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The built environment sector largely exists to serve our universal need for shelter, and as such is one of the most important consumers of raw materials in the world.

We believe the built environment should be a ‘living’ system in which building materials and products are optimally used and reused— a system that operates within the boundaries of our planet, preserves the (business) value of its resources, and ensures the well-being of its inhabitants.

Tremendous opportunities to reverse the tide and prevent a state of lock-in from happening exist for regions where the built environment sector has yet to mature. There is also still hope for those regions where the fate of the construction sector may seem set in stone.

This is why two key strategies stand out: 

- Preventing lock-in through thoughtful design
- Optimising (material value) through transformative re-design

Built environment

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Starter Kit collection

Business case

Impact on the availability of resources as well as their effect on living organisms, ecosystems, and components of the environment.

Ecological Impact

Impacts on the financial condition of a company, as well as the the economicconditions of its stakeholders and on economic systems at local, national, andglobal levels.

Economic Impact

Direct and indirect reduction in economic costs

Cost Savings

Impact on the ease of innovation, and facilitating uptake of innovations

Innovation

Reduced use of virgin materials and/or an increase of the use of secondary and bio-based materials

Reduce Material Consumption (SDG12)

Minimise waste through diversion: Instead of sending waste to landfill, it is redirected into other industrial processes for handling, treatment, recycling, recovery, or reuse in various forms. 

Minimise waste through design: At the outset of a process of project, plan and design such that there is zero waste or minimal waste during production, use, and at end of life. 

Minimise Waste (SDG12)

Producing transporation equipment and providing services for thetransportation of goods and people

Transportation and Logistics

Producing building materials and providing services to create residential and non-residential infrastructure and real estate


Construction and Infrastructure

Providing air, water, rail, and land transportation and related services for the distribution of goods, such as air freight, air courier and logistics services, maritime freight, marine courier and logistics services, rail freight, rail courier and logistics services, land freight, land courier and logistics services, including package and mail delivery and customs agents, as well as storage and warehouse facilities

Logistics Services

Producing building materials and finished and semi-finished building products for construction

Construction Materials and Products

Utilise waste streams as a source of secondary resources and recover waste for reuse and recycling

Use waste as a resource

Reuse, repurpose, and recycle waste streams within other industries

Valorise waste streams - open loop

Using waste materials that have been processed and recycled to produce new products within other industries

Using open loop recycled materials

Buildings are where we live, work and play, and also where we store machinery and goods for later consumption. Buildings are but one component of the greater built environment which includes urban infrastructure such as roads, bridges and utilities. 
Current construction techniques have buildings consuming the bulk of materials globally. With increasing urbanisation and therefore demand for buildings of every kind, we drastically need to re-imagine how we design, utilise and decommission buildings.

BUILDINGS

Impacts

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Industries

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The principles of a circular economy concern designing out waste, regenerating ecosystems and keeping items in use. Decoupling the economy from material flows—improving the rate of resource productivity faster than the economic growth rate—is also a consistent guide. By evolving with the growing number of applications of circular economy principles, and consolidating these strategies across thematic areas, Circle Economy’s Key Elements Framework (KE) renders the elements of the circular economy salient and serves as a basis to derive contextual strategies and interventions. 


The Framework consists of:
- Core Elements: Activities directly handling product or material flows; and uniquely,
- Enabling Elements: those that remove obstacles for core actors.


Key elements of the circular economy

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Circle Economy's framework of strategies and activities that define the circular economy

Urban Opportunities

  SMC debuts Philippine’s first recycled plastics road   MANILA, Philippines — Conglomerate San Miguel Corp. (SMC) has taken another major step in the area of sustainability, laying the first recycled plastics road in the Philippines. Asphalt using plastics was laid on a 1,500-square meter pilot test site at a new logistics center in General Trias, Cavite. The test site was chosen as it will be used primarily as a marshaling area for trucks with heavy load, including 18-wheelers, and heavy equipment. SMC president Ramon Ang said: “What we want to achieve is to help address an important environmental issue, and that is plastic wastes. We want to create a sustainable use for waste plastics so that they don’t end up in landfills and our rivers and oceans.” Some 900 kilos of plastic waste, equivalent to some 180,000 sachets and plastic bags, were used for the test site. SMC’s technology partner, global materials science company Dow, said that recycled plastic waste acts as a binder together with bitumen, in the production of asphalt. The company said that using recycled plastics in the production process can help make roads longer lasting and more durable compared to conventional asphalt. Independent lab testing done on SMC’s recycled plastics road asphalt shows that it exceeds the standards of the Department of Public Works and Highways. The company said that pending further testing, it can build recycled plastics roads in its facilities as well as major infrastructure projects. Last week, San Miguel also announced that it is adopting the use of biodegradable plastics for food and non-food products. For this, the company is utilizing the biodegradable plastics developed by Philippine Bioresins Corp. that can be 64.65 percent degraded in 24 months as compared to non-biodegradable plastics (4.5 percent in 24 months). The Department of Science and Technology’s Industrial Technology Development Institute gave this innovation an Environmental Technology Verification certificate. San Miguel has also discontinued its bottled water business a few years ago and embarked on the move to reduce group-wide non-product water use by 50 percent by 2025. 

 “We wanted to target these two kinds of plastic waste because neither has high economic value after use. PET (the kind of plastic that goes into soft drink bottles) is collected and sold so it eventually gets recycled or disposed of properly, but because used sando bags and candy wrappers have not commercial value, they end up landfills or find their way to the ocean through our storm drains or rivers,” says Steve Piczon, SMC’s government affairs and advocacy manager whose job it is to incubate ideas that can be scaled across businesses. Working alongside him for this specific project is the general manager of Dow Philippines, Bobby Batungbacal. “Plastic waste is the sustainability issue of our time. Dow is working with partners around the world to build plastic roads using post-consumer recycled plastic. We’ve had great success in Thailand and Vietnam where we’ve already demonstrated that it is possible to divert plastic waste toward this unique and really useful application.” Both Piczon and Batungbacal were encouraged by the tests run by independent labs and third-party providers. “Initial tests showed that asphalt made with plastic is stronger. All the parameters that we set—bitumen content, air voids, marshal stability, permeability, density—were met,” reports Batungbacal who consulted his colleagues across the Asia-Pacific. “But the proof is in the real-world trial and usage of the plastic roads, so we wanted to be very deliberate about the process and make sure that we got it right,” Piczon adds. The proposed plastic road mix was tested thrice on different dates and in different quantities to make sure that it met DPWH (Department of Public Works and Highways) standards. Testing was done at Par Geotechnical Testing Center, a DPWH-accredited facility. In the final run, the team focused solely on the use of polyethylene given that the available third-party provider could only heat the plastic at temperatures of 180 degrees centigrade. Polypropylene requires temperatures of 200 degrees centigrade or higher, but subsequent tests will focus on using PET and polypropylene as additives. Another challenge was finding machines that could shred the plastic to pieces smaller than three centimeters. The General Trias test site is a staging and marshaling area for San Miguel Integrated Logistics' growing fleet of 18-wheeler trucks. "We thought we'd put the durability of the road to the ultimate test. We want to see how it will perform when haulers and lorries drive over it," says Steve. The trial site is only 1,500 square meters, but already San Miguel Can Asia (also in General Trias) has expressed interest to pave another 5,000 square meters with plastic roads. For the first 1,500 square meters in San Miguel's logistics center, roughly 900 kilos of post-consumer plastic were used—the equivalent of 180,000 plastic bags. “We’ve seen how plastic roads perform in Thailand. It looks just like an ordinary road surface, but every kilometer of plastic road uses over 2,500 kilos of plastic waste. This is the goal for the next run in the Philippines, to use even more post-consumer waste and many more different types of plastic," says Batungbacal. Studies show that plastic roads last longer and perform better than conventional roads. "Adding plastic increases resistance and the road's anti-slip properties. And because you’re substituting up to 8% of bitumen with plastic that would otherwise just be thrown away or worst end up in our oceans it can be more cost-effective to produce,” he shares. “If you scale it up, you might be looking at additional savings. “But more than that, we’re doing the world a lot of good. We’re demonstrating that it’s possible to divert plastic waste and come up with useful, innovative real-world applications.”  Much of the plastic shredded came from Dow and San Miguel employees themselves. Adds Batungbacal, "Our entire family got into it, setting aside whatever plastic we used at home. And by the end of the month, we laid it all out and saw just how much the average Filipino family consumes in terms of plastic. It's made us so much more conscious about the issue of plastic pollution." If all goes well in subsequent trials, San Miguel and Dow Philippines hope to take the idea further and bring the technology to local government units and other companies to initially use the technology for parking lots, side streets and pavements. Says Piczon, "The hardest hurdle hasn't been the technology, it’s been convincing people to give the idea a go and to encourage them to experiment with the technology. Many of our third-party suppliers were skeptical and selling the idea wasn’t as easy as we thought it would be. On the day of the paving itself, representatives from San Miguel's infrastructure and packaging units were present, eager to document the process and see how they might adopt the technology in their businesses. San Miguel's management led by company president and COO Ramon S. Ang says that pending further testing on the General Trias pilot, SMC plans to build plastic roads in its facilities and use the technology in the group's major infrastructure projects. “We're already looking at the time when we are going to have an entire length of plastic road in the majority of our towns and cities. The goal is to use local plastic waste to produce local roads,” Piczon says. “That day is going to come, and I’m glad San Miguel and Dow helped pave the way.” 

Philippines

Province of Cavite

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San Miguel Corporation

A logistics centre in the Philippines substituted a portion of the bitumen in its roads for waste plastic, achieving a more durable surface with a longer lifespan than conventional roads.

Making durable roads with waste plastic

Impact on increased knowledge and understanding as a result of the case study

Increase Awareness

Collecting waste from households and businesses by means of refuse bins, wheeled bins, containers, etc., and providing treatment, incineration, materials recovery and reclamation, and disposal of hazardous and non-hazardous waste

Waste Management

Producing basic and specialty chemicals, inks, agricultural chemical such as fertilisers and pesticides, plastics including packaging, and rubber

Chemical and Plastic

Processing and producing food and beverages for consumption

Food and Beverage

Designing to enable multiple uses and lifecycles of a product and its materials

Design for cyclability

Industry peers to industry peer collaboration to create joint value and identify synergies

Industry collaboration

Engage with the government on circular policies and programmes

Government collaboration

Designing products to remove any barriers to recycling and enable easy recyclability

Design for recycling

Designing products to be reused for the same or different purposes in multiple lifecycles

Design for reuse

Engaging in discussions with industry stakeholders to share circular economy best practices and push the industry towards greater circularity

Guidance, dialogue with industry stakeholders

Engaging in discussions with government bodies and policymakers to push for regulations that support the circular economy

Advocacy for circular economy policy

'Mobilise' sets the direction of and builds momentum towards long-term change, while also determining how this direction is determined and governed.

Mobilise

Govern the Transition

Institutional design to enable circularity

A framework of policy instruments that enabled and encourage the transition to the circular economy

Policies

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A framework of policy instruments that enable and stimulate the transition to the circular economy

At Plastics Recycling World Expo on 3-4 June 2020 in Essen, Germany, a delegation of the Ghanaian plastics and recycling industry will discuss development priorities. In this article, the group’s technical partner in the German federal state North Rhine-Westphalia outlines progress being made in Ghana’s plastics recycling sector.  Even though the waste collected in Ghana more than doubled nationwide between 2006 and 2013, the share still remains at a low level. According to the Sustainable Development Goals Baseline Report from 2018, even in cities only around one-third of the growing quantities of waste is taken to dumpsites and the few sanitary landfills whose capacities are becoming increasingly scarce. A considerable portion is simply burnt under an open sky. Due to poor solid waste management, plastic waste like sachet water bags, water bottles, food boxes from Styrofoam and any amount of plastic bags is widespread on roadsides, clogging drains and littering beaches, causing health and flood risks. To turn such challenges into opportunities, the Ghanaian government is determined to leapfrog from waste disposal to a circular economy. In October 2019, as the first African nation, Ghana formally joined the Global Plastic Action Partnership (GPAP), an initiative launched by the World Economic Forum and supported, amongst others, by the Development Programme of the United Nations (UNDP).Since 2007, the German federal state North Rhine-Westphalia has maintained a partnership with Ghana, bringing together government institutions, universities, local governments, NGOs and companies from both sides. The German technical cooperation, implemented by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), has played a prominent role in shaping the collaboration around climate and resource protection through projects supported financially by the State Chancellery of North Rhine-Westphalia. Against this background, it was more than logical that GIZ took up the request from the Ghanaian Ministry for Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation (MESTI) to develop a project on sustainable management of plastics and to convene an international stakeholder forum in January 2018 in Accra. The main aim: To discuss with competent stakeholders the ministry’s first draft of a national plastics policy and to contribute experience gained in this field in Germany. Looking back, this forum has generated a strong momentum and raised public awareness for the urgency of tackling the challenges related to plastic littering the environment. As part of the project, GIZ piloted in collaboration with the local NGO Environment360 and with informal scrap dealers in Kumasi an incentive and take-back scheme to test a viable business model for recovering PET bottles littering the environment for recycling. PET bottles were chosen because even the informal waste pickers did not show interest in collecting them due to their volume and low weight. Having successfully tested the scheme, it can now be used for upscaling and including other types of plastics as well. To make representatives from private and public sector more familiar with the political framework conditions and technical options for managing the plastic value chain in a circular economy, GIZ organized in June 2018 a technical visit for a delegation from Ghana to North Rhine-Westphalia. On the occasion of WACEE’19, the West African Clean Energy and Environment fair and conference in Accra, MESTI and GIZ convened a second stakeholder forum on 8 November 2019. The aim was to discuss how the different stakeholders are contributing already to recovering and recycling plastics and the challenges they are facing for upscaling: plastic producers, food and beverage industry, recyclers, waste collectors, NGOs, start-ups, and local governments. The challenges plastic recyclers are facing are diverse: they range from plastic material that is not coded or locally recyclable, and extremely high interest rates for financing investments in recycling technology and high import taxes, to poor collection infrastructure and the absence of an extended producer responsibility system. In spite of these obstacles, the Ghanaian industry is recognising the potential of recycling and is becoming increasingly interested in plastic waste as a secondary raw material. To promote recycling and second-life solutions to reduce the impacts of post-consumption waste on the environment, a group of eight international companies from the chemical as well as food and beverage industry has taken the initiative and founded the Ghana Recycling Initiative by Private Enterprise (GRIPE), established under the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI). The Plastics Recycling World Exhibition 2020, taking place on 3-4 June 2020 in Essen, Germany, which is Europe’s leading focused event for plastics recycling, provides an excellent opportunity to get to know innovative technological solutions and to establish business contacts. Within the scope of the project, GIZ will therefore invite a delegation of the Ghanaian plastics and recycling industry to the trade-show. For meetings, the delegation will have its own exhibition booth and will be discussing the potential for co-operation in a specific side-event.Although Ghana has still a long way to go, important steps have been initiated to pave the way towards a circular economy. Progress can even be witnessed at Accra’s beaches where more and more PET bottles are collected for recycling. For more information contact [email protected]

Approximately 13 million metric tons of plastic waste enter the oceans annually, equivalent to one garbage truck load every minute. Even worse, the Pew Charitable Foundation estimates the volume of plastics finding its way into the world’s oceans will triple by 2040.
Some experts believe the solution lies in creating circular economies, which eliminate single-use plastic in favor of organic materials or plastics that can be recycled and reused. But that requires significant investment and infrastructure. 
In Africa less than 20 percent of plastics are recycled currently, far below European Union targets of 50 percent by 2025. In lieu of formal recycling operations, waste pickers collect litter and sell it to middlemen, who aggregate plastic waste and sell it to recyclers abroad.
But Ghana - with a 5 percent recycling rate - has emerged as a regional front runner committed to creating a domestic recycling industry that protects both the environment and impoverished, mostly-female, community of waste pickers. Last fall, Ghana became the first African country to join World Economic Forum’s Global Plastic Action Partnership (GPAP).  At a recent World Economic Forum Sustainable Development Impact Summit event, Plastics: From Global Vision to Local Action, panelists representing a coalition of government, manufacturers, technology providers, and non-profit organizations discussed how Ghana is driving change.
“We see plastic waste as a threat to our way of life and danger to environment,” said Oliver Boachie, Special Advisor from the Ghanaian Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation (MESTI). “But we also look at this as an opportunity.” 
Since 2018, the government has been working on a plastics waste program that aims to clean up environment, create jobs in plastics value chain, make resources available to manage plastics and ensure no one gets left behind. 
Global software provider, SAP SE, is also a member of GPAP and has collaborated with MESTI, private industry and local non-profits to create a technology solution that will help. 
“The recycling systems in Ghana are very analog so we’re building a digital system to connect everyone and track the volumes and types of plastic, where it goes, and the prices paid across the value chain,” said Maggie Buggie, Chief Business Officer of SAP Services.
With a foundation of reliable data, the government and private companies can determine where to invest resources and build recycling plants, while also monitoring waste pickers’ wages and living conditions. 
“By connecting the informal economy of waste pickers to the formal economy, we can ensure they receive a fair wage – and later on – get services like training or childcare,” said Buggie.
Making the Invisible Visible: Improving Pickers lives
Waste picking is a means of survival for poor, urban communities across Africa, South East Asia and Latin America. In Ghana, they recover at least 218 tonnes daily or nearly 12 percent of the total plastic waste generated.
But they have little visibility into the market price for what they’ve collected, which leaves them vulnerable to exploitation by middlemen. With the SAP solution, they will have mobile access to the average price for different kinds of materials. The government can use this data to monitor wages and take action to support pickers, for example, investing in social services that raise pickers’ living standards.
Jeffery Provencal founded rePATRN, a social enterprise that works with pickers. “We’re on the verge of an absolute game changer. We have a lack of data and the SAP solution is the best thing for it – one platform that provides all that data,” said Provencal. “We can find an efficient way to deal with the material, monetize it, and empower the waste pickers. So everyone wins.”
Private Sector Partners To Achieve Sustainability Goals 
Adwoa Coleman, Africa Sustainability and Advocacy Manager for Dow Packaging and Specialty Plastics, explains how technology will help the Ghanaian government and manufacturers achieve their sustainability goals. 
“We have a goal that one million metric tons of plastics will be collected, recycled or reused by 2030,” said Coleman. “Data is critical to establishing a market where plastic can be bought and sold, depending on where that’s happening. Harnessing that data in one app will help fuel the circular economy and ensure that collected materials are reused.”
But success requires cooperation. “Stakeholder collaboration is important – we (not only) have the government, private sector and NGOs, but also the collector and recycler. To succeed, we need to all be at the table,” she said.
Coca Cola also has big environmental ambitions. For example, it wants all its packaging materials to be recyclable by 2035 — and has a specific perspective on what that means in West Africa. “Exportation of plastic and packaging waste out of Africa is not sustainable,” said Clement Ugorji, vice president for public affairs, communications and sustainability. “We need the domestic capacity for collection and recycling and reuse on the continent. That’s the only way to achieve a truly circular economy for Africa.”
For its part, SAP believes its experience in the region developing its SAP Rural Sourcing Management (an application that supports small-holder farmers and improves visibility across agricultural value chains) gives it an advantage. Since plastic pickers and rural farmers face similar issues, applications like this will help all parties succeed.
The plastics recycling pilot project will run in Accra and several smaller cities in Ghana. Building on what is learned during this first stage, the coalition hopes to expand across Ghana, West Africa and eventually the entire continent and other regions. 

 	 Government will join the Global Plastic Action Partnership (GPAP), a new initiative created by a coalition of influential public and private leaders to fast-track plastic pollution action around the world.
The Minister of Information, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah disclosed this Wednesday at a press briefing said President Akufo-Addo, and the Environment Minister, Professor Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng will formally launch the initiative on October 1 in Accra.
GPAP is hosted at the World Economic Forum.
Ghana, under the leadership of the Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology, and Innovation (MESTI) is in the process of adopting a National Plastic Management Policy that will leverage the comprehensive management of plastics to drive sustainable development, green job creation, and environmental protection.
Therefore, Ghana has been selected as a natural first engagement in Africa for the Global Plastics Action Partnership.
As one of the fastest-growing economies in the world and a leading political and economic force in Africa, Ghana has the potential to catalyze a new era of plastic action across the continent.
The Ghana National Plastic Action Partnership will launch in close coordination with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)’s ‘Waste’ Recovery Platform, which will promote sustainable waste recovery in Ghana through connecting stakeholders across the waste management chain.
The Ghana National Plastic Action Partnership and the UNDP ‘Waste’ Recovery Platform will support the existing work being carried out by the government of Ghana, as well as successful initiatives being led by entrepreneurs and civil society actors at the local level, to accelerate the reduction of plastic waste and pollution in Ghana.
About the Ghana National Plastics Management Policy
– Ghana’s first National Plastics Management Policy aims to use the comprehensive management of plastics across their life-cycle and value-chain as a vehicle for sustainable development, enabling a shift towards a plastics circular economy.
– The Policy lays a foundation to enable the creation of an entirely new industry for redesigning, recovering and recycling plastics, preventing pollution of our environment and communities and creating many new jobs in the green economy.
– The Implementation Plan of the National Plastics Management Policy starts with a national communication strategy to change our behaviour on how we manage plastics. The next focus will be on mobilizing finances and innovation to enable new business models for sustainably managing plastics and supporting communities and companies to coordinate and plan for a circular plastics economy. Lastly, the implementation of the Policy establishes robust frameworks for good governance and shared accountability across society.
– The Ghana National Plastics Action Partnership will be supporting the Government of Ghana to implement its ambitious roadmap for a circular plastics economy, captured in the National Plastics Management Policy.
About the Global Plastic Action Partnership
– The Global Plastic Action Partnership envisions a world free of plastic waste and pollution. It represents one of the most powerful and concerted efforts working internationally to address this issue, bringing together public, private, and civil society leaders to translate commitments into concrete action.
– The goal of the Ghana NPAP is to dramatically reduce the country’s plastic waste and pollution, and to fast-track progress towards zero leakage of waste into the environment, especially the ocean. The Ghana NPAP will support the government and businesses in transitioning to a circular economy for plastics, which will fundamentally change the way plastics are manufactured, used, and re-used.
– The transition to a circular plastics economy will spur job creation in the manufacturing and innovation industries, promote public health and wellbeing, boost tourism and investment, and support Ghana’s progress towards achieving a number of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Source: https://www.myjoyonline.com 

Ghana

The Coca-Cola Company is an American multinational beverage corporation founded in 1892, best known as the producer of Coca-Cola. The Coca-Cola Company also manufactures, sells, and markets other non-alcoholic beverage concentrates and syrups, and alcoholic beverages.

Coca Cola

Nestlé S.A. is a Swiss multinational food and drink processing conglomerate corporation headquartered in Vevey, Vaud, Switzerland. It is the largest publicly held food company in the world, measured by revenue and other metrics, since 2014. 

Nestle 

Government of Ghana

The World Economic Forum is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation.

The Forum engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.

It was established in 1971 as a not-for-profit foundation and is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. It is independent, impartial and not tied to any special interests. The Forum strives in all its efforts to demonstrate entrepreneurship in the global public interest while upholding the highest standards of governance. Moral and intellectual integrity is at the heart of everything it does.

World Economic Forum

Global Plastic Action Partnership (GPAP)

Ghana Recycling Initiative by Private Enterprise (GRIPE)

Association of Ghana Industries (AGI)

Unilever plc is a British multinational consumer goods company with headquarters in London, England.

 Unilever

Guiness Ghana

Fan Milk

Voltic

PZ Cussons

In October 2019, Ghana formally joined the Global Plastic Action Partnership (GPAP), an initiative launched by the World Economic Forum. Additionally, to promote recycling and second-life solutions to reduce the impacts of post-consumption waste on the environment, a group of eight international companies from the chemical as well as food and beverage industry has taken the initiative and founded the Ghana Recycling Initiative by Private Enterprise (GRIPE), established under the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI).

Circular plastics in Ghana

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This collection has been built by a community of passionate researchers, students, and industry professionals as part of <a href="https://worldcirculartextilesday.com/" target="_blank">World Circular Textiles Day</a> (WCTD). 


World Circular Textiles Day takes place every year on 8th October. Our vision is to galvanise the collective ambitions and goals of people, organisations and businesses to reach a fully circular textiles world by 2050. Our mission is to provide a framework for circularity stakeholders to develop and deliver a collaborative, evolving roadmap and to chart circularity’s momentum annually from the 8th of October until 2050.

What does fully circular by 2050 mean?
- Shared textile resources, in the form of products and raw materials, are kept in **continual circulation**.
- Virgin resources are **replaced with circular materials**.
- Dignity, equity, and equality for the **people** involved in all parts of the circular value chain.

We need to know where we stand today to chart how to get to 100% Circularity by 2050. What circular activity is currently happening in the textiles and apparel industry, and where in the world is it happening? The WCTD Collection aims to answer this question by building the world’s largest digital library of circular textiles case studies. 

World Circular Textiles Day is proud to be supported by our 2022-23 Circular Hero Partners:
[Lenzing](https://www.lenzing.com/), [Texaid](https://retailsolutions.texaid.com/), [Bank & Vogue](https://www.bankvogue.com/), [Usha yarns limited](https://ushayarns.com/), [The Conduit](https://www.theconduit.com/), and [Asia Pacific Rayon](https://www.aprayon.com/en/)

## Want to contribute to the WCTD Collection? Sign up and add your circular textiles activities.

World Circular Textiles Day

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Impact on the health and happiness of human populations

Well-being

Scalability

Reduced green house gas emissions released into the biosphere

Reduce Emissions (SDG13)

Reduced use and withdrawal of water and rate of recycling and reuse of water

Save Water (SDG6)

Providing water and sewage services, including water collection and distribution, water treatment systems and sewage treatment facilities

Water and Sewage

Producing textile and leather products and processing them into apparel and accessories

Fashion and Textiles

Using <a href="https://echa.europa.eu/information-on-chemicals" target="_blank">materials that are not toxic or hazardous</a>.

Non-toxic materials and inputs

Enacting measures that optimise water use

Water efficiency

Enacting measures that optimise energy use

Energy efficiency

Designing products so they produce as little waste as possible during production

Design for minimal waste

Designing products so they use as little materials, water, energy, etc. as possible during use

Design for resource efficiency

Research and facilitate new technological developments to aid the transition to a circular economy.

Research and Development

Voluntary agreements around circular ambitions

VISION:
Raw materials are renewable, recyclable and safe, kept in continual circulation.

DETAIL:
Imagine a time when…the raw materials that are used to make things are sourced from existing products and regenerative agriculture, via carbon negative and climate neutral processes. Biodegradable raw materials are used for products with biodegradable end routes. Toxic chemicals have been washed out of the global materials pool, disposed of safely and replaced with beneficial alternatives. Virgin fibres made from fossil fuels have been banned, while secondary synthetic fibres, derived from what was already in the system, are kept in constant circulation as a resource. Circularity accounting methods, built on science-based metrics, help to manage a balanced system of resources, across all industries, and in line with the planet’s environmental limits.

Raw Materials and Planetary Boundaries

It is 2050.  Full systems change has taken place. This wouldn’t have been possible without the immediate action and radical steps taken from 2020 onwards. Many targets had to be identified in the early 2020s and achieved by 2030 to ensure that the 2050 goal happened in full. A sense of urgency, turbo stakeholder collaboration, supportive government regulation and clear, data driven targets enabled the mindsets and systems change needed to transform to a fully circular textiles ecosystem.

A circular economics model underpins what we have created. It reflects and supports a living organism made up of makers, users and restorers, interacting across vibrant and interconnected networks. Checks and balances, alongside transparency and accountability, ensure a healthy system. Financial, environmental, and social metrics have the purpose of serving communities and the planet. There is shared ownership of profit and loss – across all three metrics – throughout the value chain.

This is what we’ve achieved over the last 30 years:

WCTD Themes

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  Life Cycle Assessment insights Reduce the carbon footprint of cotton dyeing by up to 63% with ECOFAST™ Pure     

  ECOFAST™ Pure: Color with Integrity
Discover how you can advance more sustainable apparel production. 
     

Michigan

Dow is a global leader in textile auxiliary chemicals and related technical solutions. They are committed to delivering innovative and sustainable high-performance products, one of which is ECOFAST™ Pure. In short, the sustainable textile treatment enables cotton to have a higher affinity for dyes which is beneficial from a resource consumption and wastewater generation standpoint.&nbsp;&nbsp;