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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 features a selection of the initiatives listed on the Québec Circulaire platform.

Québec Circulaire is one of the flagship measures of the Pôle québécois de concertation sur l’économie circulaire (Quebec centre for consultation on the circular economy), a voluntary grouping of leaders from various backgrounds to accelerate the transition to the circular economy in Quebec. The information that emerges about circular economy is often fragmented by types of strategies, regions, people involved and sectors of activity. For a real change in the economic model to take place, it seemed essential to create a convergence forum for the exchange of information. Therefore, Québec Circulaire's mission is to bring together the variety of initiatives, tools, and expertise related to circular economy in Québec that are currently dispersed and will be multiplying in the coming years. 

Having begun its transition to circular economy in 2014, Québec serves as a pioneer in North America. By shining a light on the collective impact of individual and targeted initiatives, the circular economy can constitute a powerful lever for change.

This collection of case studies aims to bring together Quebec people involved in this transition, alongside facilitating access to initiatives and knowledge developed elsewhere in the world, and disseminating Quebec best practices internationally.

To learn more about Québec's initiatives to accelerate the transition to a circular economy, visit www.quebeccirculaire.org.

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Québec Circulaire

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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

Impact on increased knowledge and understanding as a result of the case study

Increase Awareness

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)

Extracting resources and processing them to produce materials for use bysociety

Materials and Fuels

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

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

Chemical and Plastic

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 reduce waste during production and use

Design out waste

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

Design for minimal waste

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

Manage

Infrastructure

Develop infrastructure to support sustainable lifestyles

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

Mobilise

Govern the Transition

Participatory governance mechanisms

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

Incentivise

Public-private partnerships

Develop infrastructure to support resource cycling

Economic Frameworks

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




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Regenerate

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

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

Ensure that infrastructure and built assets in the city are designed and upgraded to be as resource-efficient as possible.

Design infrastructure and the built environment for resource efficiency

Put enablers in place that allow circular businessesto grow, thrive and innovate (e.g. incubators, start-up funding, partnerships, innovation deals, business capacity building and testing groundsfor new business models).


Support circular and resource-efficient business innovations

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

Buildings house all production activities, and also are where people spend the majority of their time. Consequently ‘buildings’ consume  resources, namely energy and water, and produce large amounts of waste. 

The use phase of buildings represents the largest resource flows during their lifecycle. Optimised operations for different types of buildings—such as offices, industrial and commercial facilities or houses—can reduce energy, water and waste consumption, as well as operating costs, and enhance the wellbeing of users. 

Local governments can support Information and communication technology (ICT) innovation for the circular management of building operations for instance, by adopting new technologies, digital services and systems that can help with the monitoring and evaluation of (water and energy) efficiency. At the local level, policy can also set new building standards that can scale up net-zero waste, energy and water buildings. Then, the uptake of  ‘green contracts’—agreements that require the contractor to develop and implement a site management plan and favour certain types of resources—can also stimulate circular operations by legally ingraining circularity in the relationship between building owners, operators and users.


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🏢⚡  Optimised facility management

A key source of waste generated by urban residents stems from single-use plastics, such as plastic bags and packaging, and other fast moving consumer goods that are produced to be cheap and disposable. If this waste is not disposed of correctly, then such residual materials can pollute the environment. Waste that is generated in cities can also find its way outside of the city, for example, being carried in water ways to pollute other water bodies. 

Systems, initiatives and infrastructure can focus on preventing these types of waste from polluting the local environment. For example, infrastructure placed in local waterways can protect natural systems by diverting plastic pollution. Furthermore, other initiatives could clean up (plastic) waste directly to restore natural systems in a safe and effective way. 

Local governments can support the implementation of solutions by establishing partnerships with and promoting existing initiatives, as well as developing and financing the infrastructures that could reduce the pollution in the local environment.  

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👕📱  Clean up pollution of fast moving consumer goods

Mixed household waste - consisting of textiles, electronics, organic and other consumer goods - can be contaminated and difficult to separate, and hence limit the  recovery of materials and value.

Source separation reduces the upstream sorting cost and ensures that downstream recyclers receive clean feedstock, thus improving their ability to capture the value from post-consumer material streams. Source separation systems can take a variety of forms, such as providing a distributed network of collection points throughout a city for residents to drop off various types of waste materials. The most successful examples of this include: collection of electronics, plastics, waste oil, fabrics, metals, bulky goods, paper, cardboard, batteries, amongst others.

Local governments can support the implementation of the solution by developing and providing the necessary infrastructure throughout the city or engage in public-private partnerships to provide source separation systems. What is more, information campaigns can help to inform residents on which types of consumer goods can be recovered, and the most effective means of disposal. 


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👕📱  Source separation and collection systems for consumer goods 

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

  Mégot Zéro est un programme écoresponsable d’installations de cendriers, de collecte carboneutre et de recyclage de mégots de cigarettes. Notre mission est de participer activement à l’élimination de l'impact des mégots de cigarettes sur notre environnement.              
    
    
 
  
       Mégot Zéro est un programme qui vise à contribuer à l'éradication de la pollution crée par les mégots de cigarettes et à les recycler en mobiliers urbains ou articles utiles. Mégot Zéro vise aussi à sensibiliser et éduquer les fumeurs sur la pollution générée par les mégots de cigarettes et leurs impacts sur l’environnement notamment chez l’humain et son milieu. Stratégie(s) de circularité concernée(s)  Recyclage et compostageValorisation Résultats obtenus Plus de 6 000 000 de mégot collectés et recyclés depuis le début du programme en 2016 et transformé via notre partenaire recycleur en mobiliers urbains (par exemple des bancs) et en palettes de transport. Plusieurs dizaines de kiosques de sensibilisation tenus et de courses aux mégots réalisées depuis la création du programme. Principale(s) ressource(s) concernée(s) Produits, composants, matériaux mixtes et composites*Autres Autre mots-clés en lien avec l'initiative mobilier urbain, zéro déchet, sensibilisation, solution 

This article was created in partnership with the National Geographic Society.Smokers around the world buy roughly 6.5 trillion cigarettes each year. That’s 18 billion every day. While most of a cigarette’s innards and paper wrapping disintegrate when smoked, not everything gets burned. Trillions of cigarette filters—also known as butts or ends—are left over, only an estimated third of which make it into the trash. The rest are casually flung into the street or out a window.“There's something about flicking that cigarette butt,” says Cindy Zipf, executive director of Clean Ocean Action. “It's so automatic.”Cigarette filters are made of a plastic called cellulose acetate. When tossed into the environment, they dump not only that plastic, but also the nicotine, heavy metals, and many other chemicals they’ve absorbed into the surrounding environment.A recent study found that cigarette butts inhibit plant growth. They also routinely get into waterways, and eventually oceans.Zipf said cigarette butts have long been at or near the top of the list of items her organization finds during beach cleanups. The billions more that remain in the water are hazardous to marine animals, which can eat them, she said.“They look a lot more like a morsel of food on a sea surface,” says Zipf.The pollution problem has only gotten worse in recent years as e-cigarettes have become more popular, she said, because those too are largely made of plastic.“It's becoming so pervasive,” says Zipf, of both e-cigarette use and the accompanying plastic waste. “It's just a different form of the same thing.”From tobacco to plasticsPeople have been smoking or chewing tobacco for millennia. By the 1800s paper cigarettes had joined cigars, pipes, and snuff as common forms of tobacco consumption. But the invention of the cigarette rolling machine at the end of the century—which drastically increased production—started the cigarette on its path to popularity.The 20th century saw an explosion of smoking. In 1900 American adults smoked an average of 54 cigarettes per year. By 1960, that number had climbed to more than 4,000. For most of that period, cigarette filters were nonexistent. But, slowly, the health impacts of smoking became clear.Starting in the late 1930s, scientists began making connections between cigarettes and public health risks. In 1957 the Surgeon General officially declared a causal link between smoking and lung cancer. By 1964 the agency had commissioned and released a comprehensive report highlighting “a 70 percent increase in the mortality rate of smokers over non-smokers.”As public concern mounted, the tobacco companies scrambled for solutions, one of which was cigarette filters.“There was this whole attempt to reduce tar and nicotine,” says Tom Novotny, an epidemiologist at San Diego State University who was one of the first people to research the environmental impacts of cigarettes.By the late 1950s, sales of filtered cigarettes had overtaken those of unfiltered cigarettes.Tobacco companies, Novotny said, tried a variety of different filter materials, such as cotton, charcoal, and food starch, before landing on a plastic fiber called cellulose acetate, which remains the polymer of choice today.“There's still widespread misunderstanding about what [filters] are made of,” says Novotny. “A lot of smokers think it's biodegradable already.”Filters can take years to degrade and, even as they do, they break down into tiny pieces of plastic, called microplastics, which are an increasing hazard in waterways and oceans. Cigarette butts also carry a heavy load of toxic materials that can be harmful to nearby marine life, a threat that Novotny tested in the lab.“One cigarette butt in a liter [of water],” he said of his findings, “kills half the fish.”A new plastic washes upWhen Cindy Zipf goes out on her beach cleanups, it’s normal for her to find cigarette butts. But about five years ago Zipf started to see a new kind of plastic item: e-cigarettes.“They're hard plastic all around,” she says. “They look like little drives for computers.”Electronic cigarettes generally consist of four components: the cartridge or pod that holds the “e-juice” solution, a heating element, a battery, and a mouthpiece. While the pods are now replaceable, at first the whole contraption was entirely single-use. The plastic and circuitry all went straight into the garbage—or the street.The use of e-cigarettes has skyrocketed. The leading manufacturer, Juul, for example, saw its sales increase nearly sevenfold between 2014 and 2017. The FDA called the rise in use among youth especially “startling.” Today, more than 10 million Americans use e-cigarettes.As the prevalence of e-cigarettes has grown, so has the need to get rid of the waste. But their mix of electronic components and nicotine puts them in a grey area for disposal, said Yogi Hendlin, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco and one of the leading researchers on the subject.“E-cigarettes are viewed both as hazardous waste and e-waste,” he explains, noting that when he goes to high schools, he often finds “hundreds” of Juul pods in the parking lot. “From the regulatory side we haven't been able to find a way to deal with this.”The effects of e-cigarette waste on the environment are only starting to be studied. Novotny, for instance, has begun looking into the toxicity to marine life, as he did with cigarette butts.On beaches, Zipf said the plastic pods were piling up so fast that her organization was considering making them a permanent fixture of the collection scorecard that volunteers take with them as they tally items.Zipf says: “We seem to keep coming up with new and different uses—wasteful uses—for plastic.”Three things you can do to be part of the solution:1. Quit smoking.2. Roll your own.3. Don’t use e-cigarettes unless they can be recycled.Ban the butt?The city of San Francisco spends some $7.5 million a year cleaning up cigarette butts, and is far from the only municipality dealing with such waste.“It’s the last remaining acceptable form of littering,” says Novotny. “People are more likely to pick up their dog poop than cigarette butts.”Novotny proposes a radical solution: Ban cigarette butts altogether.Filters, he said, haven’t been shown to improve health outcomes. They may even be making the problem worse because they make smoking a less harsh experience and give people a sense that they are doing less harm. He also notes the environmental benefits, and has argued for a ban on single-use plastic filters, a step that the California state senate is currently considering.“It's a major intervention that I think could work,” he says.Hendlin agreed that change was only likely to come through legislative pressure. He pointed to documents showing that the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company was exploring biodegradable filters as far back as the 1970s, yet cellulose acetate remains the standard today. Most companies, he says, have also explored alternative filter materials, but “haven't pulled the trigger because they haven't been forced.”"They are ready, if unwilling," says Hendlin.Companies argue that filters are key to keeping emissions in line with regulations and that it’s consumers who are holding up adoption of filter replacements.Imperial, one of the largest tobacco brands in the country, tested paper filters in France, but according to a spokesperson, “Sadly, it was commercially unsuccessful.” Consumers, he said, didn’t like the taste.As Simon Cleverly, with British American Tobacco, puts it: “There is currently no feasible alternative to cellulose acetate for filters.”A number of companies claim to make more environmentally friendly products, such as Smokey Treats and Greenbutts. The president of Greenbutts, Tadas Lisauskas, says the company is in negotiations with major manufacturers to implement their filters. But both Novotny and Hendlin are skeptical that startups like these address the root of the problem: people's proclivity to litter cigarette butts.E-cigarettes pose a similarly vexing plastic problem. The pods must be rinsed before being thrown in the normal trash and as of 2018, Juul tweeted, it didn’t “currently have a recycling program available.”Hendlin says reengineering e-cigarettes to use less, or no, plastic would be an expensive proposition that companies seem loathe to undertake. He suggests that a deposit system, such as the one for propane canisters, might be a better route.“When you went to buy your next set of pods,” he says, “you exchange your old cartridges for your new ones and you get your [money] back.”A spokesperson for Juul Labs says the company is already exploring a similar option and testing it internally. “We are committed to responsible stewardship and environmental sustainability,” he says in an email. “We take environmental impact seriously.”There have been some steps toward addressing the plastic hazards that cigarettes pose. In 2016 India banned the use of plastic packaging for tobacco products. This year in New Jersey, a law went into effect that limits smoking and vaping in public parks and on beaches. But Zipf says many people will probably continue to flick their butts or drop their pods—and the plastics that accompany them—where they aren’t supposed to.“I think it's ignorance of convenience,” she says. “There's really no excuse for it.”National Geographic is committed to reducing plastics pollution. Learn more about our non-profit activities at natgeo.org/plastics. This story is part of Planet or Plastic?—our multiyear effort to raise awareness about the global plastic waste crisis. Learn what you can do to reduce your own single-use plastics, and take your pledge.

Montreal

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Municipality of Montreal

SAESEM (Montreal Society for Action, Education and Environmental Awareness)

<p>To avoid cigarette filters polluting the environment, a not-so-expensive programme has been launched in 2016 in the city of Montreal, in partnership with the municipality, collecting and recycling more than 6 million of cigarette butts so far.</p>