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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 increased knowledge and understanding as a result of the case study

Increase Awareness

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

Contribution to social parity, or impact on social disparity

Equality

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

Reduced green house gas emissions released into the biosphere

Reduce Emissions (SDG13)

Providing recreational and cultural services, including hotels, resorts, casinos, sport and fitness centers, stadiums, golf courses and amusement parks, restaurants, bars, pubs, fast-food or take-out facilities, as well as libraries and museums

Hospitality and Tourism

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

Agriculture

Processing and producing food and beverages for consumption

Food and Beverage

Ensure renewable, reusable, non-toxic resources are utilised as materials and energy in an efficient way

Prioritise regenerative resources

Consider opportunities to create greater value and align incentives that build on the interaction between products and services

Rethink the business model

Engage with the local community where facilities or offices are located

Community collaboration

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

Guidance, dialogue with industry stakeholders

Working together with industry peers to engage in business activities or exploratory projects that advance the circular economy

Joint industry ventures, projects, pilots

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

Businesses

Communities

Much of the world’s croplands are situated within peri-urban areas, yet this food is often not consumed in its neighbouring urban area, rather it is exported and consumed vast distances away. By strengthening links with food producers in surrounding peri-urban and urban areas, to create city-region food systems, cities can influence the way food is produced and how resources are managed. For example, reconnecting cities with their local food production can create local economies, encourage local seasonal diets, denser local transport networks, and even support regenerative techniques that support native crop varieties. This in conjunction with trade supports a more distributed system that relies on a diverse range of suppliers, and can cycle nutrients from food wastes back to the surrounding ecosystem. 

To foster city-region food systems, local governments can engage and convene stakeholders along the local food chain, from farmers, to logistics companies, to jointly envision the path to a local circular food system. This can be facilitated through the creation of platforms to connect local stakeholders. The City can also stimulate the use of regionally and regeneratively produced foods through, for example, rewarding best practices, and raising public awareness through campaigns. 


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🍏  Strengthen urban-rural links within the food system

The industrial production and consumption of meats and animal-based products places increasing pressures on land- and water-use, and is a driving cause of global greenhouse gas emissions. Local governments can play an important role in encouraging residents to shift towards local and plant-based diets that can improve the health of the planet, as well as residents and local economies if the food is sourced regionally.

For example, local governments can help to raise the awareness of the positive ecological and health impacts of a locally sourced and plant-based diet through information campaigns in the city. Local governments can improve access to locally produced plant-based foods throughout the city by allocating space for, and supporting local markets and suppliers. To lead by example, canteens managed by the public sector, for example, in schools and municipal offices, can develop menus that offer plant-based and seasonal choices. 


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🍏  Seasonal plant based diets

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

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

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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            Ashia Aubourg was Food Tank’s Food Justice Fellow. She earned a BS & BA in Food Studies & Policy Studies from Syracuse University, focusing on community-based food systems and public policy. Ashia has worked with food justice, public health, and education non-profits. Ashia is passionate about fostering an equitable food system and amplifying BIPOC food narratives.                                
   

 
Our vision is of a socially and environmentally just food system where the means of production and distribution, including access to land, seed and water are controlled not by markets or corporations but by the people themselves. We are working to create just production and trading systems that provide a fair income to food producers and guarantee the rights of communities to access healthy and nutritious food produced using ecologically sound and sustainable methods, a food system existing in a wider context of social justice. Access to land, seed and water
The continuing privatisation and commoditisation of land, seed and water jeopardise the creation of socially and environmentally just food systems. Addressing and overcoming the obstacles that prevent food producers from having greater access to and control over land, seed and water are fundamental to the ethics of what we do.
We believe that:

Small-scale food producers should have greater access to and control over the land they use for food production;
Access to land must be free from discrimination of all kinds;
The skills necessary for small scale food production should be made more available;
Small producers should have the right to save, sow and sell their own seeds;
Seeds should not be open to commoditisation through intellectual property rights or contamination by Genetically Modified seeds;
Water exists for the benefit of all living beings and it should be under public, democratic, local and sustainable management;
Access to water should be a right guaranteed to producers who use ecologically sound methods of production;

For more details click here.
 Just production & trading systems
We believe that:

Food should be consumed as close as practicable to where it is grown;
The supply chain between producer, retailer and consumer should be as small as possible;
Food should be grown, distributed and processed by small-scale operations;
The production, distribution and processing should safeguard decent rights, conditions and rewards for all workers, and ideally be democratically owned and controlled by the workers/ the community.

More on our growing and sourcing principles.
More on what it means to be a co-operative. What do we mean by ecologically sound and sustainable methods? 
For us, this means:

Working with natural processes to build soil life, fertility and structure as the basis for plant and human health;
Sustainable use of natural resources and minimum reliance on outside inputs;
Avoidance of chemical fertilisers and pesticides;
Maintenance of biodiversity and respect for wildlife;
Avoidance of genetically modified organisms.

Additionally, we believe that current levels of consumption of meat and animal products are disastrous in terms of planetary and human health and animal rights/welfare, and that a just and sustainable food system and diet should be predominantly plant-based.
More on our growing and sourcing principles.
More on our permaculture approach. What is social justice?
We understand social justice to exist when society is based on the principles of equality and solidarity, when it places need before profit and when it is free from oppression and discrimination of all kinds. Social justice can be difficult to define and changes with the dynamics of exclusion in society. For us it is an aim we strive for in the work we do.
More on our considerations of people and community.
More on what it means to be a co-operative.
We want to see a world based on equality and co-operation, where people can take control over all aspects of their lives. Taking collective control over our own work is a starting point. We aim to reduce reliance on exploitative structures and build a secure base from which to challenge injustice and encourage others to do so. 
OrganicLea’s Mission Statement:
We produce and distribute food and plants locally, and inspire and support others to do the same. With a workers’ co-operative at our core, we bring people together to take action towards a more just and sustainable society.  

United Kingdom

London

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Organiclea

<p>Organiclea purchases local food and ensures that food producers are getting adequate incomes. Their efforts help ensure that their community can access healthy, culturally appropriate, and sustainably produced food. </p>