The goal of CityLoops has been to support small and medium sized city administrations across Europe in promoting the transition to a circular economy, for two specific material streams: construction and demolition waste (CDW, including soil), and bio-waste - representing the two most significant material fractions in terms of environmental impact, overall volume, and economic significance. The project has demonstrated a variety of different approaches which local governments can take through a series of pilot actions within seven European cities: Apeldoorn (NL), Bodø (NO), Høje-Taastrup & Roskilde (DK), Mikkeli (FI), Porto (PT) and Seville (ES), for which a number of new tools, procedures and other instruments were developed and tested.
On CDW, actions ranged from developing new procedures and tools for carrying out pre-demolition audits, scans and material tracking, establishing material passports and secondary material marketplaces, to including reused materials and other circular aspects within new construction projects. For bio-waste an even wider range of activities were demonstrated, from efforts to reduce food waste in the tourism and social economy sectors, to developing and testing products made from collected bio-waste, establishing a green space certification system, or implementing new separated collection systems and routes.
To frame these actions within cities wider circular economy efforts, these pilots were accompanied by:
- The development and testing of tools for assessing a city’s circularity - the urban circularity assessment (UCA), and sector-wide circularity assessment (SCA)
- Actions to promote the use of procurement to support circular economy measures
- The development of stakeholder engagement structures to ensure relevant stakeholders are directly engaged in pilot activities, and promote longer term collaboration
The final aim is for the approaches taken in the project to be replicated by, or act as inspiration for other cities across Europe of any size or location. To this end, a group of seven replication zones have closely accompanied the project actions, and completed replication plans.
Ultimately, the project has demonstrated that local governments can (and must) act as central agents of change in the transition to a circular economy. The wide variety of measures demonstrated across the pilots, reflects the variety of levers local governments have for promoting this change - from direct interventions, such as public construction works, waste collection infrastructure, or catering procurement, to indirect measures promoting engagement amongst other stakeholders, such as citizen participation platforms, entrepreneurial contests, or awareness raising campaigns. The project also clearly demonstrated that direct cut and paste replication is rarely viable, but that spreading approaches to other regions of Europe is a detailed and lengthy process in which a number of factors are key, including broad dialogue within the “replicator” administrations, and with relevant local stakeholders, access to in-depth information on the approach to implementation followed and challenges faced, direct exchange with peers in the inspirational pilot cases.
