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Circle Economy and ICLEI have partnered up to initiate the go to knowledge hub of case studies about the circular economy in cities. The Cities Collection is a repository of case studies that demonstrate the role of cities in the circular transition, and includes policies, business cases and research articles. Cases in the Collection flow into an ecosystem of digital products which support users in transitioning cities to circularity, for example [Ganbatte](https://ganbatte.world/cities/) and <a href="https://circulars.iclei.org/" target="_blank">ICLEI Circulars</a>, both part of the <a href="https://circulars.iclei.org/circle-lab-for-cities/" target = _blank">Circle Lab for Cities Programme.</a>




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Circular Cities

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Business case

Impact on the health and happiness of human populations

Well-being

Direct and indirect reduction in economic costs

Cost Savings

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

Innovation

Scalability

Reduced green house gas emissions released into the biosphere

Reduce Emissions (SDG13)

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)

Reduced use of fossil fuel energy sources and/or increased use of renewable energy

Reduce Energy Consumption

Providing electricity and gas services, including traditional and renewable energy generation, natural and manufactured gas and operating gas networks

Energy Utilities and Independent Power Producers

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

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

Use waste as a resource

Replace energy sources with less impactful alternatives and enact energy efficiency measures

Regenerative energy

Recover waste energy or generate fuels and energy from waste streams

Energy recovery from waste

Generating energy from waste through processes such as anaerobic digestion, gasification, incineration, etc.

Generating energy from waste

Develop regenerative infrastructure

Process waste into valuable industrial inputs or consumer products; distribute processed waste to users.

Process waste and ensure its re-entry into industry at its highest value

The food system nourishes populations and employs 50% of the global workforce, but:
- it currently drives a quarter of the overshoot on the climate change planetary boundary due to its greenhouse gas (GHG) production, 
- animal farming alone uses over one-quarter of all land, equivalent to the size of the Americas,
- nearly a quarter of freshwater resources are lost due to rampant food waste, and
- it is the single largest driver of biodiversity loss.

A circular food system must address the whole value chain, from production to consumption to waste management. The four key solutions for the food system are:
- Put healthier, satiating foods first: Prioritise satiating and healthy foods with a lower environmental impact—ideally shifting calories from meat, fish, and dairy towards cereals, fruits, vegetables, and nuts.
- Go local, seasonal, and organic: Prioritise the production and consumption of local, seasonal, and organic produce (sometimes in combination with GMO to reduce pests and disease loss on crops), which can lead to a significantly reduced need for chemical inputs, fuels, and processing services that contribute to environmental impacts.
- Mainstream regenerative agriculture: Scale up agricultural practices that regenerate ecosystems, recirculate nutrients and sequester carbon by design. 
- End avoidable food waste: Minimise food loss and valorise waste following the food waste hierarchy along the supply chain and at the consumer level through better management of transport and storage, more refrigeration and smart planning, and technology at the consumer and food service levels.



🍏 Food Systems

Cities consume about 75% of global energy and emit between 50% and 60% of global greenhouse gases (UN-Habitat). To reduce the negative impact of their energy consumption, cities need to shift away from fossil fuels and move towards renewable energy sources. Such a shift will help cities work towards their climate change mitigation and adaptation action plans. Renewable energy technologies such as wind, water, solar, and geothermal can also help improve access to energy in vulnerable and marginalised neighbourhoods through, for example, decentralised, off-grid solutions.

Renewable energy technologies can harvest the energy in nature’s processes, such as wind, and solar radiation and geothermal heat, that can be replenished within a human lifespan. In contrast, fossil fuels are materials that are not replenished within a human lifespan and are combusted for energy, losing the fuel material and resulting in emissions.

Local governments can develop sustainable energy plans, considering different energy resources and requirements, to develop a robust strategy for the development of renewable energy technologies and infrastructure throughout the city. They can also institute specific legislation and tax systems to regulate energy production and consumption, incentivise research and development of cleaner, more efficient technologies. Via Power Purchase Agreements cities can buy renewable energy from green energy providers and fix the price in order to provide security to financial institutions to finance renewable energy infrastructure. Furthermore, increasing awareness and facilitating capacity-building on planning urban sustainable energy projects can help the uptake of clean energy across the city by different stakeholders—from citizens to businesses and institutions. Facilitating collaboration, then, will be crucial, since private companies operate most of the world’s energy systems.


⚡ Energy Systems

Governments

Regenerate strategies phase out hazardous or toxic materials and processes and substitute them with regenerative biomass resources. A circular economy aims to mimic natural cycles—by shifting to more regenerative farming practices, for example—while also maximising the share of circular biomass that enters the economy. Regeneration can happen both at the systems level (by designing regenerative processes) as well as at the product level (by switching synthetic to organic fertilisers, for example).

Regenerate

Cycle strategies aim to cycle and reuse materials at their highest value: they maximise the volume of secondary materials re-entering the economy, ultimately minimising the need for virgin material inputs and therefore also narrowing flows. Of course, virgin materials will always be needed to a degree: all materials degrade and can’t be cycled infinitely, use energy, and require blending with virgin materials to maintain strength and functionality.

Cycle

Impacts

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Industries

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

Policy Instruments

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

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

The Circular City Actions Framework provides urban changemakers with five complementary strategies they can use to start working towards a more circular system. 

The framework is action-based to provide users with concrete strategic directions and showcase the desired outcomes of each strategy. 
The framework consists of five complementary **strategies**, under which **sub-strategies** provide further detail. Finally, each sub-strategy consists of a diversity of tangible **solutions** which are framed in relation to key thematic areas. 

Note: solutions are currently focused on:
- 🍏 **Food systems**
- 🏢  **Built environment**
- 👕📱  **Consumer goods**
- ⚡ **Energy Systems**
- 🚌 **Mobility Systems**
- 💧 **Water Systems**

More thematic areas are coming soon...

'Click through each of the five strategy cards below to explore the framework and circular economy case studies in more depth!'



This framework was developed in collaboration with ICLEI, Metabolic and Ellen MacArthur Foundation with support from the MAVA Foundation. Read more about it [here]( https://circulars.iclei.org/action-framework/). 



Circular City Actions Framework

An action-based framework for local governments working towards circular cities

Thematic Areas

City Stakeholders

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Based on the work of [Bocken et al. (2016)](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309699661_Product_design_and_business_model_strategies_for_a_circular_economy), the Four Flows Framework serves as a simple framework for managing resource flows in a circular economy by using less (Narrow), using for longer (Slow), using again (Cycle), and using clean, regenerative materials and energy (Regenerate).

These different principles of circular economy can be applied to our socioeconomic metabolism: we can design stocks like buildings, infrastructure, machinery, and vehicles to be rich resource mines for the future, and design manufactured goods and consumables to be cycled and made regenerative. Furthermore, the focus must also centre on getting more value out of fewer materials. Achieving the aims of a circular economy—minimising material use, regenerating the Earth, and preventing material losses—can be done through these four key strategies mentioned above.

Source: Circle Economy. (2023). *[The circularity gap report 2023](https://www.circularity-gap.world/2023)* (p.22). Amsterdam: Circle Economy. 

Four Flows Framework

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In spring, the air in Seville is sweet with the scent of azahar, orange blossom, but the 5.7m kilos of bitter fruit the city’s 48,000 trees deposit on the streets in winter are a hazard for pedestrians and a headache for the city’s cleaning department.Now a scheme has been launched to produce an entirely different kind of juice from the unwanted oranges: electricity. The southern Spanish city has begun a pilot scheme to use the methane produced as the fruit ferments to generate clean electricity.The initial scheme launched by Emasesa, the municipal water company, will use 35 tonnes of fruit to generate clean energy to run one of the city’s water purification plants. The oranges will go into an existing facility that already generates electricity from organic matter. As the oranges ferment, the methane captured will be used to drive the generator.“We hope that soon we will be able to recycle all the city’s oranges,” said Benigno López, the head of Emasesa’s environmental department. To achieve this, he estimates the city would need to invest about €250,000.“The juice is fructose made up of very short carbon chains and the energetic performance of these carbon chains during the fermentation process is very high,” he said. “It’s not just about saving money. The oranges are a problem for the city and we’re producing added value from waste.”Ripe oranges in the gardens of the Real Alcazar. The city council employs about 200 people to collect the fruit. Photograph: robertharding/AlamyWhile the aim for now is to use the energy to run the water purification plants, the eventual plan is to put surplus electricity back into the grid. The team behind the project argues that, given the vast quantity of fruit that would otherwise go into landfill or be used as fertiliser, the potential is huge. They say trials have shown that 1,000kg will produce 50kWh, enough to provide electricity to five homes for one day, and calculate that if all the city’s oranges were recycled and the energy put back into the grid, 73,000 homes could be powered.“Emasesa is now a role model in Spain for sustainability and the fight against climate change,” Juan Espadas Cejas, the mayor of Seville, told a press conference at the launch of the project.“New investment is especially directed at the water purification plants that consume almost 40% of the energy needed to provide the city with drinking water and sanitation,” he said.“This project will help us to reach our targets for reducing emissions, energy self-sufficiency and the circular economy.”The oranges look pretty while on the tree but once they fall and are squashed under the wheels of cars the streets become sticky with juice and black with flies. The city council employs about 200 people to collect the fruit.The bitter oranges, which originate in Asia, were introduced by the Arabs around 1,000 years ago and have adapted well to the southern Spanish climate.A house in the Santa Cruz neighbourhood. Most of the fruit is exported to Britain for marmalade. Photograph: Santiago Urquijo/Getty Images“They have taken root here, they’re resistant to pollution and have adapted well to the region,” said Fernando Mora Figueroa, the head of the city’s parks department. “People say the city of Seville is the world’s largest orange grove.”The region produces about 15,000 tonnes of the oranges but the Spanish don’t eat them and most of the fruit from the surrounding region is exported to Britain, where it is made into marmalade. Seville oranges are also the key ingredient of Cointreau and Grand Marnier.The origin of marmalade is surrounded by myths and legends. Some link it to British copper miners working for Rio Tinto in nearby Huelva, the same miners who founded Spain’s first football team, Recreativo de Huelva, at the end of the 19th century.However, a handwritten recipe for marmalade dating from 1683 was found in Dunrobin castle in Sutherland in the Scottish Highlands. Legend has it that a ship carrying oranges from Spain took refuge in Dundee harbour and local confectionery maker James Keiller was the first to find a use for the otherwise inedible fruit. This may be a myth, but in 1797 Keiller did produce the first commercial brand of marmalade.

Seville

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Emasesa

<p>The city of Seville, Spain is home to 48,000 orange trees: a beautiful site, but a hassle to the city when the fruits rot and fall from the trees, posing a hazard to pedestrians and a huge chore for the city’s cleaning department. The city has launched an initiative to use the oranges for a greater purpose: electricity. The scheme was developed by Emasesa, the municipal water company, which will capture methane from the oranges as they ferment and use it to drive the generator that powers one of the city’s water purification plants. They hope to eventually scale the project and use all the oranges in Seville, which would require an investment of around €250,000. Eventually, the plan is to put surplus electricity back into the grid; 1,000 kilograms of oranges can produce enough energy to power five homes for a day, so much that if all the oranges were recycled, 73,000 homes could be powered cleanly.&nbsp;</p>