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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

Scalability

Reduced green house gas emissions released into the biosphere

Reduce Emissions (SDG13)

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

Agriculture

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

Prioritise regenerative resources

Work together throughout the supply chain, internally within organisations and with the public sector and communities to increase transparency and create joint value

Team up to create joint value

Implement innovation programmes

Living labs

**Harmonize with nature** by promoting infrastructure, production systems and sourcing that allows natural ecosystems to thrive




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Regenerate

Includes measures that protect and enhance ecosystems and biodiversity both within and beyond city boundaries, as well as actions to restore degraded ecosystems.


Protect and restore local ecosystems

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

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).

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

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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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  Circular Economy: Tapping the Power of Wastewa...  Wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) consume large amounts of energy, estimated at between 1% and 3% of global energy output. State-of-the-art facilities consume ...  

Boulder

City of Boulder

<p>Boulder County, Colorado, and the city of Boulder undertook a joint carbon sequestration pilot project to study how regenerative agricultural practices could be used to sequester carbon in surrounding agricultural land. Besides expanding nourishing, sustainable food options for local residents, the municipalities plan to use carbon farming strategies to help them meet emission reduction targets.</p>

Agriculture for carbon sequestration in Colorado

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

Processing and producing food and beverages for consumption

Food and Beverage

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

Use waste as a resource

'Regulate' changes the rules of the systems to achieve compliance through enforcement. 


Regulate

Bans

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

Businesses

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

 Approximately 40 percent of food in the United States goes uneaten. Most of this wasted food ends up in landfills, and food is the largest single component of municipal solid waste in landfills, according to the 2019 report, “Bans and Beyond: Designing and Implementing Organic Waste Bans and Mandatory Organics Recycling Laws.”As more businesses, states and municipalities roll out sustainability initiatives, such as San Diego’s Zero Waste Plan that includes a 75 percent waste diversion goal by 2020, organic waste bans to reduce or divert food scrap from landfills are gaining momentum across the country.Some states—California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont—and municipalities—Austin, Texas; Boulder, Colorado; Hennepin County, Minnesota; Portland, Oregon; New York City; San Francisco; and Seattle—have passed organic waste bans or mandatory organics recycling laws. Other states, such as Maryland, and localities are looking to pass similar legislation.“The issue is getting attention. I don’t think we’re done seeing these types of policies come into place,” says Lorenzo Macaluso, director of Green Business Services at Massachusetts-based environmental nonprofit Center for EcoTechnology (CET), which authored the Bans and Beyond report in collaboration with the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic.The legislative landscapeConnecticut was the first state to pass a commercial organic waste law in 2011, followed by California, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont in 2014 and New York in 2019.Connecticut requires food waste generators, including supermarkets and food manufacturers, to divert their food waste to an organics processing facility. In January, the law extended to other businesses, which can comply by donating surplus food, using food scraps for animal feed, processing food scraps on-site or sending food scraps to a composting or anaerobic digestion (AD) facility.California’s mandatory commercial recycling law requires certain businesses to subscribe to organic waste recycling services. Massachusetts established its disposal ban through regulation. In 2014, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP) added “commercial organic material” to a list of several materials already barred from landfills.“Some of the bans are legislatively driven. Those often result more in a law [being passed]. Some are regulatory in nature,” Macaluso says. “New York went through a more legislative process, where it went through the governor’s office.”Rhode Island’s law requires certain businesses and institutions to divert organic waste to authorized composting or AD facilities, or a “facility that uses any other authorized recycling method, including on-site treatment and animal feed.”While Vermont’s Universal Recycling Law passed in 2012, the phased-in food scrap disposal ban began in 2014. By July, all individuals, businesses, corporations and public entities, in addition to commercial food waste generators, will be banned from disposing of food scraps. Prior to 2020, businesses and households were exempt from the law if they weren’t located within 20 miles of a processing facility.“We have over 100 transfer stations now across the state that offer food scrap collection,” says Josh Kelly, materials management section chief for the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, which is part of the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). “That was required because if you’re going to have a ban on something, you need to make it convenient for people.”New York’s food scrap recycling requirement passed in 2019 as part of the state’s 2020 budget process. The law, which will take effect in 2022, requires food scrap generators that produce more than two tons per week to donate food scraps. It also requires certain food scrap generators to divert food scraps to organic processing facilities.“Comparing where we are today to several years ago, there’s very significant advancement in the level of activity and awareness about food waste in a handful of states in the Northeast and California. There are also a rising number of jurisdictions either on a county or city level that have similar policies in place,” Macaluso says.Organic recycling ordinances have popped up in Hennepin County, Minnesota, which adopted new commercial organic recycling and new residential collection requirements in 2018. In Portland, Oregon, a city council ordinance will require businesses to separate and divert food waste in 2020.“I think across the board where these bans are happening, there’s significantly increased economic activity,” Macaluso says."I think across the board where these bans are happening, there’s significantly increased economic activity.” –Lorenzo Macaluso, director of Green Business Services at the Center for EcoTechnology.According to a MassDEP survey targeting organic waste haulers, processors and composters, all three sectors reported “significant growth” over the last decade. The ban supported more than 500 additional jobs across the sectors from 2010 to 2016 and nearly $175 million in industry activity. Processors planned the highest average capital investments for 2017, followed by haulers, and the analysis projects that growth to continue in Massachusetts.For haulers, organic waste bans by nature create increased demand for food waste collection services. According to a hauler survey conducted by CET, commercial haulers in Massachusetts reported their customer base grew from 1,350 in 2014 to 2,300 in 2018.Driven by the marketIn 2017, Vermont composting facilities collected more food scraps than ever before, a 9 percent increase from 2016, according to a 2019 Universal Recycling status report.In 2018, the legislature also made reasonable changes to the law to “address some concerns of different stakeholders,” Kelly says. The modifications included removing the hauler requirement to collect leaf and yard debris and postponing the food scrap hauling requirement to 2020.“There was a lot of debate around the food scrap hauling requirement,” says Kelly, whose team at DEC oversees implementing the ban. “We surveyed haulers and our municipalities and districts. We came back with results that showed haulers overwhelmingly don’t want to offer food scrap collection.”Another modification requires haulers to only provide pickup services to businesses and apartment buildings, unless another hauler can provide the service, Kelly says. The state now has more than 20 haulers offering food scrap pickup services.“If somebody is wanting to get into this market, then that could exempt the other haulers, but I will say they don’t really love the idea of another hauler providing a service, so they start to compete with each other,” he says.Before the ban went into effect, three of the state’s largest haulers—Casella Waste Systems, Gauthier Trucking and Myers Container Service—offered waste, recycling and food scrap collection services.Since the ban, new hauling companies, especially those focused on providing residential food scrap pickup services, have sprouted up. Starting in the summer of 2020, Got Trash and Ruggiero Trash Removal will debut food scrap collection services to residents across several Vermont counties. No Waste Compost, a rising hauler in the commercial and residential space, also reports doubling its customer base from 2018 to 2019, Kelly says.Vermont has also seen an increase in composting and AD facilities as well as in “traditional solid waste haulers owning and operating these facilities,” he says. Casella, Rutland, Vermont, is opening an organics recovery facility. Vanguard Renewables, Wellesley, Massachusetts, is also developing an anaerobic digestion facility in Salisbury and the construction of the Wyman Frasier Compost Facility is also underway in the state. These facilities didn’t exist before the ban, Kelly notes.“In Vermont’s experience with the food waste ban, it leads to businesses springing up to meet the demand,” Kelly says. He adds food rescue has increased 50 percent in Vermont since the ban went into effect.When Vermont passed its Universal Recycling Law, stakeholders worked with the state to develop a set of standardized recycling symbols residents and businesses could recognize, Kelly says, including an apple core on a green background to encourage composting and a whole apple on a purple background to encourage food donation and rescue. Since these symbols were released, haulers and solid waste companies have started displaying them on their trucks and collection bins.“We’re hopeful that the symbol is used universally for food scrap recycling,” Kelly says. “I hope 20 years from now, you see that apple core everywhere.”This article originally ran in the March issue of Waste Today.  

United States

Seattle

Austin

San Francisco

Portland

New York

Hennepin

New York City government

San Francisco 

Austin 

City of Seattle

City of Portland

Hennepin County

<p>Several municipalities in the US (Austin, Texas; Boulder, Colorado; Hennepin County, Minnesota; Portland, Oregon; New York City; San Francisco; and Seattle) have passed organic waste bans or mandatory organics recycling laws. In Portland, Oregon, a city council ordinance will require businesses to separate and divert food waste in 2020.</p>