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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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CAT Africa

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 social fabric of the community and well-being of the individuals and families.

Social 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

Impact on the health and happiness of human populations

Well-being

Direct and indirect effects that increase revenues or the potential for new revenues, for example from new products, customer segments, partnerships or business models

Revenue Potential

Efficiency gains on operations or transactions either through cultural or technological shifts

Productivity

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)

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 and gathering crop and animal products from land and water through farming, hunting, and fishing

Agriculture

Reuse, repurpose, and recycle waste streams within other industries

Valorise waste streams - open loop

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

Industry collaboration

Engage with the local community where facilities or offices are located

Community collaboration

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

Mobilise

 Convene Towards Action

Advocate for circular change

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

Ensure that household and business waste is collected and appropriately sorted (by type, label, etc.) to allow for maximum recovery of value.


Collect and sort waste to facilitate recovery

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

Manufactured goods, such as vehicles, textiles, appliances and equipment and their associated production processes are big employers but:
- production processes often rely on fossil fuels and currently drive one-third of the overshoot on the climate change planetary boundary due to its GHG production, 
- material- and energy-intensive industrial activities are linked to deforestation and drive 15% on both the land use and freshwater planetary boundaries, 
- manufacturing goods results in substantial amounts of hazardous industrial waste and leaks chemicals into the environment.

Here, circular solutions must tackle the full value chain, but material demand must also shrink: this will necessitate a societal shift to favouring sufficiency over excess and reducing consumption to sustainable levels. Our four key solutions for manufactured goods are:
- Mainstream industrial symbiosis and efficiency : Achieve process improvements, scrap diversion and reduction in yield losses through greater industrial symbiosis and efficiency. Foster tighter collaboration within and between industries to deliver powerful material and emissions savings.
- Extend the lifetime of machinery, equipment, and goods: Maximise the lifetime of goods that serve our daily needs to bring a number of environmental benefits. 
- Buy what's needed: Reduce the number of purchases of common electronic goods, appliances, and other equipment to sufficiency levels. 
- Eschew fast fashion in favour of sustainable textiles: Drastically reduce new clothing purchases. All used clothing should go on to be repaired, reused or, if needed, recycled appropriately. Prioritise natural and local textile manufacturing, as well as higher-quality and more durable garments. 




👕📱 Consumer Goods

Communities

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

Policies

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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

 Reading Time:  5 minutesColombian capital Bogotá this month announced a target to improve air quality by 10 per cent on average in the next four years as part of broader development plans that feature sustainability as “the main axis”.
Bogotá’s District Development Plan 2020-2024: a new social and environmental contract for the 21st century, dubbed #ElPlanQueNosReactiva (“The Plan That Reactivates Us”), allocates the equivalent of billions of US dollars towards a green recovery from COVID-19.
“We have decided not to lose this cleaner air that we have had during the pandemic,” said Mayor of Bogotá Claudia López Hernández last week in webinar, Clear Skies to Clean Air, organized by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, World Wildlife Fund and Environmental Defense Fund, in collaboration with the World Bank.
The city recorded an 80 per cent drop in concentrations of particulate pollution in early April, though it saw air pollution spikes from forest fires in the Orinoquía and Venezuela that also wafted into other Colombian cities, including Medellín.
The plan is the City’s main salvo against air pollution since the new mayor took office earlier this year, and focuses heavily on sustainable, multimodal mobility, which commands the biggest share of planned funding at 36,919,236 million Colombian pesos (about US$9.8 billion), followed by education and health.
“It means continuing to electrify our mass transport system, which is based on buses, and going ahead and advancing with a metro system that is fully electric,” said Mayor López.
“We now have more than 1 million trips on a daily basis by bike. We already have 560 kilometres of cycleways, which is, I think, the greatest bike network among developing cities. And we have a plan, a goal to increase that by 50 per cent, to 60 kilometres more bike lanes around the city,” she continued.
Since March, when the pandemic started, Bogotá temporarily added 80 kilometres of bike lanes to its existing network, joining many major cities around the world including New York, Milan, Barcelona, London and Paris, which sought to help citizens with safe physical distancing as they took to their bicycles to avoid crowds on public transport.
“There are more people walking, so we need to improve the network for pedestrians, too,” Mayor Lopéz said.
“I think this is going to be the most important thing, because, of course, if people are walking or bike riding, they have a lower risk of being infected by coronavirus in the short term, but, also, in the long term, it has a very good impact on improving air pollution and also, reducing congestion in the city. So this is not going to be temporary,” she said.
Bogotá’s 8 million residents are joined each day by about 2 million commuters, who shuttle in and out from the surrounding municipalities for work and education, leading the city government to initiate a regional approach to air quality improvement.
“We need to offer a clean option of metro regional transportation for those 2 million people,” said Mayor Lopéz.
“We just approved a constitutional reform that allows us to build an institution for the metropolitan area, between Bogotá and Cundinamarca, the province surrounding us that has 46 municipalities,” said Mayor Lopéz.
“That was a sort of miracle in the middle of a pandemic,” she added.
Bogotá is cradled high in the middle of three mountain systems, among which is nestled a world-famous moor system that feeds freshwater to the city and its surrounding provinces, adding impetus to the creation of a formal regional institution.
“Creating this institution is very important, firstly, for general environmental protection, but secondly, because we will not be able to achieve our goals if our surrounding municipalities don’t share the vision and the goals, because air doesn’t know our administrative and political boundaries.
“Because of that, we also need to build this clean mass transit system at the regional level, because otherwise we can have, within the city, this metro system, this bike system, this pedestrian system, but if people come into the city every day with diesel, fuel based cars… we’re not going to be able to achieve our own measures,” said Mayor Lopéz.
Her administration expects that these measures, combined, to make “the most important contribution in the long term” to air quality improvement, in a city where transportation contributes over 70 per cent of air pollution.
Bogotá will also impose restrictions on trucks, which will have to comply with standards if they wish to enter the city, and is considering offering incentives for switches to cleaner technology.
“Because, otherwise, we’re not going to be able to achieve our goal of 10 per cent air pollution reduction,” explained the mayor.
The proposed budget includes an investment of close to 30,000 million Colombian pesos (about US$8 million) specifically towards the goal of reducing concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM10 and PM2.5) by 10 per cent through the implementation of the city’s 2030 Comprehensive Air Quality Management Plan.
Under the 2030 plan, the Ministry of Environment intends to strengthen and expand the city’s coverage of air quality monitoring, focusing on its southwestern areas, where air pollution concentrations are highest, and where the administration has now announced it will to work with all relevant actors to achieve a deeper reduction of 18 per cent.
The Council approved Bogotá’s development plan after extensive debate in which lobbyists and citizens participated.
“We qualify our air quality goal to integrate one of our major concerns: that there is air governance. We will seek the participation of civil society and academia that allows us to move forward to meet our air quality goals,” said Bogotá’s Secretary of the Environment, Carolina Urrutia.
The new development plan is closely aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals, with 67 per cent of its goals directly related to CONPES 3918, Colombia’s strategy to implement the SDGs in the country, and 90 per cent of its budget related to SDG targets, including those related to air quality and climate change.
“We managed to expand our action plan to commit the District to reducing at least 15 per cent of its greenhouse gases during this Government. We are all going to have to contribute to reduce those gases that are causing climate change,” Urrutia said.
The city’s administration sees the environment as “an ally for the economic reactivation of the city”.
“It is an opportunity to create green jobs and businesses, to encourage the transition from grey to green economies, to promote energy transitions, and we will do so,” it stated in a media release.
Emphasizing its focus on sustainability and air quality, Bogotá’s district administration has taken on the slogan #UnidosPorUnNuevoAire, or United for A New Air, promising to work to protect the health of those most vulnerable to pollution: children and the elderly.
“It is the first time that as a local government Bogota set specific goals and committed itself to specific goals to clean air pollution. It seems modest, but… because air pollution has increased systematically, and we committed to decrease it by 10 per cent on average in the next four years, it is quite ambitious, as the experts on this topic know. It’s such a hard job to get done,” said Mayor Lopéz.
Bogotá economy has been badly hit by measures to halt the spread of COVID-19 since it went into lockdown in mid-March, the earliest of all Colombian cities.
But, as it emerges from pandemic restrictions, the mayor sees opportunities to invest in a sustainable recovery, emphasizing, among other things, inclusive education and attracting green and tech jobs that allow for flexible movement.
“We’re going to take the advantage that the pandemic allows us to speed up this agenda for clean air and for different modes of clean and green transportation, and we’re going to take that opportunity forward,” Mayor Lopéz said.
Source: Secretaría Distrital de Ambiente, Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá D.C.
Read the media release from the Ministry of Environment here: Plan de Desarrollo: Mejorar la calidad del aire 10 %, prioridad para esta Administración
See the Mayor’s presentation of the plan here: Plan de Desarrollo 2020-2024: un nuevo contrato social y ambiental para el siglo XXI
Watch the WWF webinar here (when available) here (scroll to “Clear Skies to Clean Air”)
Banner photo by Carlos Felipe Pardo/CC BY 2.0 

Kenya

Nakuru

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Practical Action Kenya

Nakuru Waste Collectors and Recyclers Management

German Technical Cooperation

<p>In Nakuru, Kenya's fourth-largest city, the insufficient waste collection systems and unregulated waste disposal have resulted in huge amounts of waste accumulating in the region. That is why with the collaboration of multiple stakeholders, an effective solution came forward to adress this issue. Nakuru Waste Collectors and Recyclers Management (NAWACOM) has set up an operation where waste gets collected from households with the help of waste collectors and then later sold as valuable compost to the local farmers. The organisation’s solution contributed to social and environmental benefits, as they reduced waste levels, gave income opportunities for the community, and provided useful product offering to increase agricultural yields.&nbsp;</p>