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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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Policy case

Impact on the quantity or quality of jobs, and shifts in the labour market

Jobs

Impact on the health and happiness of human populations

Well-being

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)

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

Engage with the government on circular policies and programmes

Government collaboration

Engage with the local community where facilities or offices are located

Community collaboration

Collection programmes that process products and parts for reuse or recycling within other industries

Open loop collection

Public-private partnerships

Public-civil partnerships

Eliminate waste by maximizing the recovery of resources at the end of the use phase so that they can be reintroduced into production processes


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Recover

Incorporate extended use in project planning phases; create or update city policies to allow for extended use.


Design and regulate for separation and recovery

Managing municipal food wastes at scale may require complex and costly infrastructures to collect, transport and process these residual materials. Large-scale composting facilities are challenging to place and zone appropriately in space-scarce cities.

Community-based initiatives, for example, community composting, can provide a localised solution to managing urban food wastes. Community composting initiatives are small(er)-scale solutions that are distributed throughout the city, located close to the sources of food waste, reducing the need for complex logistics and collection systems. Community composting schemes can take a variety of forms, for example, in-vessel composting (IVC), as well as vermicomposting (which utilises insects to break down organic materials). Community composting initiatives can generate valuable by-products for use in (urban) agriculture, in gardens and in parks, as well as support community building. 

Local governments can support the development and implementation of community composting schemes through the provision of equipment and infrastructure, for example,  composting boxes. The formation of public-civic partnerships can help formulate the relationships and validate the valuable role such activities can play in the management of organic waste streams. Awareness raising can be facilitated through collaboration with schools. 


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🍏  Community composting

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

Communities

Governments

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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Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, is known as the Garden City by its residents. Forests, savannah woodlands and botanical gardens break up the urban space and give a home to diverse species.But in recent years these green retreats have been at risk. New developments have been built on river buffer zones, protected parkland has been bought for private developments, and new housing plans have been made with no provision for green or public space. Now, thanks to the persistence of a small group of champions, and the support of international partners, Lilongwe City Council has been developing an action plan to integrate biodiversity into its planning decisions.Martha Kalemba, an environmental officer at Malawi's Department of Environmental Affairs, first became interested in biodiversity while studying at university. Inspired by stories of how other capital cities as diverse as Tokyo and Manila were restoring nature, her thesis investigated how lower income countries could integrate biodiversity into the planning process and she used Lilongwe as her case study. Lilongwe: Growing fast Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world and Lilongwe is one of the fastest growing cities in Africa. Ever since the first Urban Master Plan (1968), Lilongwe City Council has earmarked space for afforestation and conservation, but as the population has expanded, new settlements have started to encroach into protected areas, forests have been depleted as people have sought fuel for cooking and heating, and freshwater sources have been polluted. A turning point Kalemba recalls that the issue of biodiversity hit the national agenda for two reasons: The government had recently begun to revise its National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan, which underscored the economic as well as social benefits of biodiversity to Malawians via food, shelter, medicine and income. As part of this process the government had started to map the biodiversity profile of the capital city, Lilongwe, andLilongwe became a pilot for an international programme designed to improve ecosystem management. The programme, known as 'Local Action for Biodiversity', was run by international cities network ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability and involved 21 local governments.Taking action With ICLEI's support, the city council decided to develop an in-depth biodiversity report for Lilongwe that would assess the status of its ecosystems, including wetlands, parks and planted forests, as well as the institutional arrangements in government for protecting the city's natural assets. As a signal of its commitment to the process, the government seconded two national staff members to Lilongwe City Council to share their experiences of developing the national strategy.The first step was to put together a task force of different departments to explore the role of biodiversity in different aspects of urban life. The task force included departmental staff from fisheries, wildlife and parks, national herbarium, forestry, and local officials from urban planning, information, finance, trade, and from recreation, as well as local NGOs. Monipher Musasa, also based with the Department of Environmental Affairs, recalls that few local government officials had heard of the term biodiversity or considered it as an issue for their programmes of work. By exploring the different services that ecosystems provided the city, local officials began to see the economic as well as environmental benefits of biodiversity. For the first time officials began to see the relevance of biodiversity to their programmes of work and activity — Monipher MusasaStaff working with the water and electricity boards described how their budgets were going towards the clearance of invasive species, while representatives at the Ministry of Wildlife and Tourism shared their experiences of how the city's precious parks and nature reserves were under threat from development. The city council published its biodiversity report in 2013. It provides a comprehensive overview of the role and value that biodiversity plays in the city, and as a result the task force has gone on to develop an action plan for the city.Soon to be completed, the plan is a practical roadmap for integrating biodiversity issues into all planning processes. This will restore the city's precious natural reserves as a means of delivering on broader developmental aims. Seeds of change For Kalemba, the big step forward is the fact that city-level officials are taking ownership of parts of the action plan and have started to collaborate with other government departments. The participatory process of developing the action plan created awareness in city officials not working directly in biodiversity management – Martha Kalemba This is a marked change from two years ago when the term 'biodiversity' was still unfamiliar to many of them. For Tiyamike Malija, a desk officer at the city council, the process has already made an impact: "All along people have been applying to have these [protected] plots for construction, but recently a decision has been made to turn these areas into parks." She describes how the city council has also decided to scale up the afforestation programme that takes place every rainy season.  Looking ahead With ICLEI's support, the task team has learned some important lessons along the way. For example, representatives from key sectors, such as health and education, were not present at the first meeting and as a result it has proved difficult to engage them.The team has also learnt that rather than host meetings at the city council buildings, which has allowed officials to drop in and out, in future they would hope to host the meetings at other departments to ensure that members participate in the entire meeting. Putting the action plan into motion will require funds and commitment from across the government, admits Musasa, and so the task ahead is still daunting given the number of other challenges that the country is facing.However, the experience so far has begun to convince the city council that biodiversity is not merely a rural and remote issue but one that is central to the urban context. Resources

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Lilongwe

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City of Lilongwe

Center for Community Organization and Development

Society for Women against Aids in Malawi

<p>The development of a community-based organisation to treat municipal organic waste and process it into&nbsp;compost for the Mtandire area got established by a public-private partnership between Lilongwe City Council and several community groups and entrepreneurs. This collaboration enabled the city council to achieve better waste management in low-income areas, by adopting the model where women collect the organic waste from the neighborhood, sort it and then transport the waste, followed by Four Seasons Nursery (a large private horticultural company) buying and using that composted organic manure, providing income for the women.</p>