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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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Circular food systems entail that the food is produced regeneratively and, where appropriate, locally. Food and packaging waste are designed out entirely, while healthy, low-impact diets are promoted and easy to access. 

[Circle Economy](https://www.circle-economy.com/) is a not-for-profit organisation working to accelerate the circular transition. Through the *Circularity Gap Reporting Initiative*, our mission is to deliver an annual global Circularity Metric that measures the state of the world economy and identifies key levers to transition to global circularity. With nature as our guide, we work alongside cross-sector stakeholders from academia, businesses, NGOs and governments to provide a powerful combination of practical and scalable interventions that transform circular opportunities into realities. 

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Circular Food

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Limes and lemons - Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

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Starter Kit collection

Policy 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 increased knowledge and understanding as a result of the case study

Increase Awareness

Direct and indirect reduction in economic costs

Cost Savings

Scalability

Reduced use of virgin materials and/or an increase of the use of secondary and bio-based materials

Reduce Material Consumption (SDG12)

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)

Producing agricultural products and processing them into food and beverageproducts for consumption

Agri/Food

Societal Services

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

Account for the systems perspective during the design process, to use the right materials, to design for appropriate lifetime and to design for extended future use

Design for the future

Designing to enable multiple uses and lifecycles of a product and its materials

Design for cyclability

Designing products to be reused for the same or different purposes in multiple lifecycles

Design for reuse

'Inform' increases the overall levels of awareness and builds the necessary skills and knowledge around the circular economy to foster long-term change.

Inform

Implement innovation programmes

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

Mobilise

Visions and Ambitions

Roadmaps and strategies and targets

Govern the Transition

Institutional design to enable circularity

 Convene Towards Action

Advocate for circular change

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


Regulate

Legislation

Bans

'Incentivise' sends market signals and support to businesses, citizens and governments to promote certain activities.

Incentivise

Public-private partnerships

Awareness raising events

Economic Frameworks

Use longer and more often by extending and intensifying use of existing resources, products, spaces and infrastructure

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Reuse

Maintain and repair city-owned spaces and infrastructure to increase longevity, and support opportunities for residents to do the same for privately owned items and property

Support reuse, repair, remanufacturing, maintenance of existing resources, products, spaces & infrastructure

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

Governments

Single-use packaging is ubiquitous in food services and retail, yet it is increasingly linked to multiple health, sanitation and environmental problems - polluting both the city, its waterways  and surrounding ecosystems. 

Reusable food and drink containers can help to design out and eliminate, where possible, the use of single-use packaging in food services and retail. Reusable containers can be used, washed and reused multiple times to mitigate plastics pollution at its source.

Commonly, the implementation of reusable food and drinks containers relies on a strong collaboration with businesses to adopt such schemes. Yet, local governments can play an important role in promoting and supporting these behaviours. This support can come in a variety of forms, for example, awareness raising campaigns aimed at residents, as well as  promoting businesses that are engaging with reusable food and drink containers. Experimental zones can also be used to test and encourage the use of reusable containers. Local governments can, in partnership with regional and national governments, regulate the use of certain materials and packaging in the city, which incentivises reusable packaging for food and drink.

*Caution: with their often higher per-unit impact when compared with single-use alternatives, implementing reusable container schemes must be balanced with behaviour change away from a throw-away mindset to ensure that these containers are used multiple times, otherwise the expected environmental impact may not be realised. *


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🍏  Reusable food and drink containers

Slow strategies aim to keep materials in use for as long as possible, for example through design for durability and repairability. A more circular economy is also a slower one: materials, components, and products—and even buildings and infrastructure—that we lock in stocks are made to last. This will lower material demand in the long run, in essence also serving to narrow resource flows.

Slow

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

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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     [Gettyimages Bank]   SEOUL -- Seoul City will work with Yogiyo, a South Korean food delivery service app, and Itgreen, a company specialized in cleaning and resupplying food containers, to encourage restaurants to use reusable food containers made of metal and other durable materials for food delivery services. Currently, almost every restaurant uses disposable products such as styrofoam containers and plastic forks for delivery orders because it is a laborsome and time-taking job for shop owners to retrieve, clean and reuse dishes and kitchen utensils after customers have finished eating.  South Korea's food delivery market is growing rapidly due to a prolonged coronavirus pandemic. About 20 trillion won ($16.8 billion) worth of transactions were made through food delivery apps in 2020. According to Seoul, about 54 million disposable containers were used for delivery per month in 2021.  Seoul said in a statement on October 6 that the city will team up with Delivery Hero Korea, the operator of Yogiyo, the Korea Franchise Association and Itgreen, a company specialized in the distribution and collection of reusable food containers, to demonstrate a three-month project designed to encourage delivery restaurants and customers use reusable containers and utensils. Delivery Hero Korea will create a special section in Yogiyo where customers can choose to receive their orders packed inside reusable food containers while the Korea Franchise Association encourages local restaurants to participate in the green project. Itgreen will provide reusable containers to restaurants and resupply them after collecting and cleaning. Seoul will operate the pilot project for three months starting on October 7. About 100 popular delivery restaurants in the southern district of Gangnam, South Korea's center of finance and fashion trends, will participate in the project. Users can choose and order food from participating restaurants through Yogiyo and food will be delivered in reusable packages. used containers will be put in a bag and left outside the door of customers' homes or offices. An extra fee of 500 won ($0.42) will be charged if a customer chooses to receive food in reusable containers.   "This service will attract customers who find it hard to get rid of leftovers after eating delivered food. Customers can just leave leftover food inside reusable containers and deliverymen will take care of it," Seoul official Kim Jae-kwon told Aju Business Daily. As a long-term plan, Seoul plans to reduce the monthly usage of some 54 million disposable containers by having all Seoul restaurants adopt reusable containers.  "Regarding the current situation in which non-face-to-face consumption has become a new trend due to the spread of COVID-19, it is important for various organizations and companies to cooperate to reduce the usage of disposable products in food delivery service sectors," Yoo Yeon-sik, head of Seoul's climate environment division, was quoted as saying.   

     [Gettyimages Bank]   SEOUL -- In an effort to reduce plastic waste generated by disposable delivery food containers, Seoul will accelerate the adoption of reusable food containers by expanding service areas. Through a four-month pilot project involving some 100 popular restaurants that began in a southern district in October 2021, the capital city found that the rate of consumers choosing reusable dishes over disposable containers has increased by 30 percent every week.   According to data released by the Korea Consumer Agency, an average consumer who often eats delivered food generates about 11 kilograms (24 pounds) of plastic waste every year. Only about 45 percent of disposable plastic containers were recyclable. Food delivery services have gained popularity amid a coronavirus pandemic because people favored eating delivered food over going out to crowded restaurants.   The Seoul city government joined hands with four popular food delivery service operators -- Baedal Minjok, Yogiyo, Coupang Eats, and Ddangyo -- to expand the number of partner restaurants to up to 500. A company that will retrieve, wash, and redistribute reusable containers will be selected by the end of April.   The pilot project was adopted first in Gangnam, the city's heart of fashion and trends. Two more districts -- the southwestern district of Gwanak and the northeastern district of Gwangjin -- with university campuses will be added to the areas of service. Reusable container retrieval boxes will be installed on campuses to raise awareness among university students.   "We hope that a new eco-friendly consumer trend will become popular thanks to food delivery service operators who were eager to join the campaign," Seoul Vice Mayor Cho In-dong said in a statement on April 14.   

Seoul

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Yogiyo

Itgreen

Municipality of Seoul

<p>Seoul City Government work with Yogiyo, Korea Franchise Association, and Itgreen to encourage restaurants to use reusable food containers made of metal and other durable materials for food delivery services. This is part of a long-term plan to reduce waste generated from monthly usage of disposable containers.</p>