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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

Direct and indirect reduction in economic costs

Cost Savings

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)

Providing public and private education and support services at any level or for any profession, and governmental and public administration services, including judicial, regulatory, and legislative activities, taxation, defence, public order and safety, immigration services, foreign affairs and the administration of government programmes

Education and Government 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

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

Use waste as a resource

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

Inform

'Manage' influences the use and function of physical and material elements within the urban environment. 

Manage

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


Regulate

 Develop research, structure knowledge, encourage innovation networks and disseminate findings with integrity


Strengthen and advance knowledge

Redesign systems to lay the foundation for circular activities and enable the transition to a circular economy 

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Rethink

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

Facilitate cross-collaboration by engaging city departments, industries and businesses on ambitious, closed-loop circular projects.

Support closed-loop systems and cross-sectoral synergies

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

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

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

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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“All the forces in the world are not as powerful as an idea whose time has come.” - Victor HugoChanges in mindset are crucial to facilitating actual system changes in society, and initiatives in schools can stimulate this shift. The city of Milan has promoted a number of campaigns in school canteens over the past few years, for example rescheduling snack times to reduce fruit waste, providing reusable ‘doggy bags’, and instituting recovery schemes to donate surplus school dinners. Such initiatives not only prevent food waste, but introduce children to the topic of food waste, thus reinforcing positive habits at an early age.In Sardinia in 2003, officials were obliged to rethink the food waste system to achieve targets set out in the European landfill directive. At that time, only two out of about 50 municipalities had separate waste collection, and average organic collection rates were less than 4%. To fulfil their legal obligations, Sardinia set up a Regional Programme for Biowaste underpinned by a simple but powerful thought: “while untreated, biowaste is a hazard, but if treated and sorted separately, it could be a benefit for the environment”. The shift in mindset encapsulated by this simple idea is one of the most powerful drivers for transitioning to a less wasteful, more circular system.In a country such as Italy, this idea has its roots in the nation’s proud heritage in produce and cuisine. As Luigi Riccardo from Intesa Sanpaolo, one of the largest banking groups in Italy, observes, “My grandmother would never consider food scraps as ‘waste’ but would see it as important for feeding the earth to grow the next crop.”Supporting policy frameworksWith the correct mindset in place, the next stage is to develop policies and incentives (both ‘push and pull’) to create the conditions that allow concrete measures to be adopted.An example of ‘push’ policy is Sardinia’s biowaste programme, which instituted compulsory separate collection, while at the same time increasing landfill tax for organics to the maximum possible rate. On the ‘pull’ side, a number of regions introduced a system of incentives to reward municipalities with high separate collection rates, and penalise those that lag behind. Municipalities that exceed a threshold rate set slightly above the average receive a rebate, those that fall below pay a surcharge. The whole system is balanced internally, so there are no additional costs. The scheme has so far provided the city of Parma with €710,000 (USD 800,000) in rebates.Financial instruments exist not only for municipalities, but also for individual households. Pay-as-you-throw (PAYT) tariffs comprise a fixed fee component related to household size and a variable amount based on the volume of residual waste. In some regions, there is an additional incentive connected to the variable tariff, discounting households that practise home composting of vegetable waste. This discount can be as much as 30%, in the case of Treviso. The impact of these new tariff systems can be significant, within a few weeks of introducing a PAYT system in the city of Ferrara, collection rates increased from 54% to 85%.There are also various non-policy interventions that municipalities can enact. For example, being transparent with what happens with the organic flows and where benefits accrue. Communicating how the whole system is improving and emphasising the important contribution of individual households to this story, can galvanise citizens to make a greater effort.Community as a catalyst for changeIn many of the Italian regions analysed, grassroots community mobilisation has been an important driver of change. Many policy interventions and technology installations would not have come about without self-organised community groups lobbying authorities to refocus their priorities.For example, in Parma a civil society group ensured that the topic of better collection systems was included in all regional election debates. In Capannori, a primary school teacher called Rossano Ercolini started a grassroots movement called Ambiente e Futuro. A central part of their demands was a waste management plan that addressed pollution concerns. A year later Ercollini, now head of the waste management company, started implementing the community-developed collection system, which after a short time facilitated recycling of over 80% of Capannori’s waste.

Treviso

Milan

Parma

Sardinia

Capannori

Municipality of Milan

City of Parma

<p>A number of regions in Italy have significantly increased bio and organic waste separation by transforming their waste collection systems. A group of Italian cities and regions including Milan, Parma, Sardinia, Treviso, and Capannori, within a few years have significantly improved their systems, and in doing so, have saved money, created jobs, and reduced environmental impacts.</p><p>In the case of Milan, back in 2011, the city started implementing an ambitious scheme to separately collect bio-waste and recycle it back into local soil or use it to make biogas. With 1.4 million inhabitants in an extremely densely populated area, Milan is now one of the leading examples in Europe of how to design and implement an effective system. After a decade of implementation, in 2019 the system collected 95 kg of bio-waste per inhabitant with a contamination rate of less than 5%, whilst the city also had a total municipal waste separate collection rate of 62%.&nbsp;</p>