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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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This collection is being created to regroup all case studies related to the packaging industry (CAT purpose)

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Packaging collection

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 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 ease of innovation, and facilitating uptake of innovations

Innovation

Scalability

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

Extracting resources and processing them to produce materials for use bysociety

Materials and Fuels

Producing and providing business and consumer goods and services

Goods and Services

Providing specialist services to support consumers, businesses, andgovernments

Professional Services

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

Providing various support services for businesses and governments, such as research, testing, certification and consulting services, cleaning and maintenance services, security and protection services, legal, accounting and bookkeeping services, information management, data processing, and business process outsourcing services

Research & Commercial Services

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 basic and specialty chemicals, inks, agricultural chemical such as fertilisers and pesticides, plastics including packaging, and rubber

Chemical and Plastic

Extracting and gathering wood through forestry and producing wood and paper products

Wood and Paper

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

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

Use waste as a resource

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

Rethink the business model

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

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

Utilise bio-based, reusable, non-toxic and non-critical materials

Regenerative materials

Reuse, repurpose, and recycle waste streams within the same industry

Valorise waste streams - closed loop

Deliver products through business models that ensure maximum value

Product business models

Designing to reduce waste during production and use

Design out waste

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

Design for cyclability

Engage and guide customers and consumers to ensure circular use of products

Customer / consumer collaboration

Engage internally to guide employees and facilitate greater knowledge sharing between internal divisions

Internal collaboration

Using materials that can be easily reused or recycled after use

Reusable, recyclable materials and inputs

Providing products through leasing, rental, or pay-per-use models instead of sales

Leasing, rental, pay per use

Selling high quality, long-lasting products

Sale of durable, long-lasting goods

Designing products so they produce as little waste as possible during production

Design for minimal waste

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

Design for reuse

Facilitate discussions and meetings between internal team members to identify circular opportunities

Dialogue with internal stakeholders

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


Regulate

 Regulation

Legislation

Bans

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

Incentivise

 Direct Financial Support

Grant funding

Public-private partnerships

 Fiscal Frameworks

Tax breaks

Economic Frameworks

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

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Rethink

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

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Reuse

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

High-level changes to policy and practice (such as taxation systems, investment and procurement guidelines and criteria) that disincentivize activities that perpetuate linear economic systems, as well as vision-setting (goals, roadmaps) to catalyze
action on circularity across the city

Eliminate linear incentives and set goals and incentives for circularity

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

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

Current dominant, globalized food systems trigger far-reaching detrimental socioeconomic and environmental effects. As such, they struggle to meet the food demands of a growing population and face external shocks, such as resource scarcity, climate change and health crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Local governments are directly or indirectly connected to all stages of the food value chain. For this reason, it is importanto for them to leverage this strategic position and develop an initial and collective vision, setting out transformational targets, monitoring and evaluation frameworks, and key action areas and solutions urgently required to transform food systems—from food consumption and production to waste prevention and management.

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🍏  Targets and roadmaps for a circular food system

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

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

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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The first question Lauren Sweeney set out to answer when she co-founded DeliverZero, a platform for ordering meals in reusable containers, was: do other people care about takeout packaging waste? “Is it just me standing in front of recycling bins with sushi containers knowing they’re not going to be recycled?” she asked herself at the time.It wasn’t just her. In November 2019, she and two partners launched the DeliverZero website, where people could place takeout orders that would arrive in reusable boxes instead of the standard disposables. Despite offering food from only a few restaurants in one Brooklyn neighborhood and having a “very bad” user interface the app quickly took off.Sweeney, who is the chief marketing officer, and her co-founders, Adam Farbiarz and Byron Sorrells, spent three months expanding in Brooklyn and were just about to cross into Manhattan when Covid struck. They shut down, redesigned and relaunched in the summer of 2020, when New Yorkers were hunkered down at home, hankering for meals cooked by someone else.Now, more than 130 restaurants in two boroughs dispatch their food in sturdy green polypropylene containers furnished by DeliverZero, which can be returned, washed and reused 1,000 times apiece.More than 70% of Americans report ordering takeout or delivery one to three times a week, according to a survey by the Ocean Conservancy, and demand for food delivery increased by about 15% during the pandemic. The result is hundreds of billions of single-use products – plastic boxes that often don’t or can’t get recycled, fiber bowls that leach harmful chemicals into the environment, compostable cups breaking down in landfills and releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.DeliverZero is one of a growing number of startups trying to take the waste out of takeout. Success hinges on solutions that scale and an increasing consumer appetite for sustainability.“What we really want to do is displace single-use packaging [and] replace it with a network of reusable containers that are easy to receive and easy to return,” Sweeney said. Over their lifetimes, reusable containers create lower greenhouse gas emissions and use less energy and water than single-use containers, even after dishwashing.“There are a number of innovative startups proving that takeout doesn’t need to be synonymous with large volumes of disposable waste,” said Olga Kachook, a senior manager at the Sustainable Packaging Coalition.Their progress can be seen in Denver; Seattle; San Diego; Portland, Oregon; Minneapolis-Saint Paul; Durham, North Carolina; and on the Hawaii island of Oʻahu. Even big global brands are testing the waters. Burger King will pilot reusable soda cups and Whopper boxes in New York City and Portland, Oregon, by early 2022. McDonald’s started serving coffee in reusable cups in some UK locations this summer.“We are on the cusp of a reuse revolution,” according to a statement by Bridget Croke, managing director of Closed Loop Partners, an investment firm that funds circular economy projects, in a recent report. Emerging models, she predicted, will “build reuse back into our cultural and behavioral norms”.Ordering food in reusable containers is fundamentally the same as doing it the “old-fashioned” way, with an extra step or two at the start and end. The details vary slightly between companies, and many are designed for in-person pickup.The startups provide restaurants with containers, usually made from durable, recyclable plastic, which leak less than disposables and retain heat better. Often they are stamped with a QR code and checked out, like a library book, to customers who flash an app on their phone when picking up their food. Some companies require customers to pay a few dollars a month for a subscription, others charge a small fee per box and a few are free.Customers return the rinsed containers to participating restaurants or at drop-boxes. They’re charged penalties or lose their deposit if they don’t. Return rates tend to be high.AliSDeliverZero will collect reusables when customers’ next meal is dropped off. Photograph: DeliverZero/Ali SmithDeliverZero, which was designed for ordering from and delivering to customers’ homes, makes returns especially easy. Customers can drop off boxes at any DeliverZero restaurant, or hand them to the courier who brings the next meal to their door.In most arrangements, restaurants pay for reusable boxes at rates competitive with the cost of disposables. They might pass some cost on to the customer in the form of fees or in the price of food.DeliverZero does not charge restaurants or customers for the boxes themselves. Instead, the company takes a commission that tends to be between 5% and 20% of sales. “We haven’t taken higher than 22.5%, which is the floor for other platforms,” Sweeney said. Companies such as Seamless and its parent, GrubHub, drew ire for charging restaurants upward of 30% an order during the worst of the pandemic, leading cities including New York and San Francisco to cap delivery fees.DeliverZero is in the process of making its reusable boxes available on other big platforms, for 25 cents a box. Sweeney wants to make it possible for diners to get their food in reusable containers, even if they prefer to stick with the delivery apps already on their phones.As much as 80% of a restaurant’s outgoing orders are for delivery, according to Maia Tekle, who worked at delivery company Caviar before co-founding Dispatch Goods in San Francisco. “You just can’t tackle the [packaging] problem unless you tackle delivery,” said co-founder and chief executive officer Lindsey Hoell. Most of the delivery orders from the 50 or so restaurants that use Dispatch Good’s stainless steel dishes come through third-party apps.Maia Tekle, left, and Lindsey Hoell, right, co-founders of Dispatch Goods, with some of their stainless steel containers. Photograph: Courtesy of Dispatch GoodsHoell and Tekle aim to make reuse as routine as recycling. They envision a “fourth bin” for reusables, next to trash, recycling and food scraps.Dispatch Goods runs weekly pickup routes, much like curbside waste collection. Users schedule home pickup, and drivers retrieve tins along with reusable items from other companies such as mason jars and meal kit freezer packs, which the company sells to grocery stores and other businesses that want to use upcycled packaging.Regulation and public partnerships could help build a more robust reuse system, said Sarah Currie-Halpern, co-founder of waste reduction consultancy Think Zero. “I don’t think that the private sector can bring reusables mainstream on its own.”A small tax on disposables could fund new return kiosks and dishwashing facilities, she said, and local governments could support fledgling companies. The city of Boulder, for example, partnered with RepEATer on its reusable takeout container program, offering grant funding and helping it attract new restaurants and diners. Several cities and states are moving to restrict or ban single-use plastics in restaurants. In Germany, restaurants that offer takeout will be required to offer reusable containers starting in 2023.Hoell is confident her reuse model can work outside the dense, eco-conscious enclaves of northern California, noting that delivery services like DoorDash and Instacart are flourishing in the suburbs and the zero-waste movement has lots of momentum.“It may be a while before we are in rural Arkansas, but all metro areas with populations over 500,000 are opportunities for the fourth bin system,” she said.Sweeney, too, is optimistic. She said that New York, where some residents have never turned on their ovens, is uniquely positioned. “But across the world people are eating food they didn’t make themselves,” she said. “There’s a market for sustainable reusable systems everywhere.”

United States

Boulder

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Municipality of Boulder

RepEATer Program

DeliverZero

<p>Pouring out into the oceans, single-use products harm marine wildlife by causing marine pollution, leach harmful chemicals into the environmental and contribute to greenhouse gases when breaking down in landfills. Despite interesting business initiatives such as DeliverZero, the private sector can’t bring reusables mainstream on their own. Cities can thus play a supportive key role, mainly by building a more robust reuse system through regulation and public partnerships.</p>