This year’s event focused on circular investments to empower cities and regions on their circular journey.
From words to action
In her welcoming words, Astrid Ladefoged from DG Research & Innovation highlighted the crucial role that European cities and regions play in the green transition. With the new Commission taking office in December, a shift in focus is expected. Over the past years, important action plans, roadmaps and legislative updates have been issued. Now, it is time to move to implementation. Special attention needs to be paid to the local, city and regional levels in translating the regulatory framework into action. The success stories and peer-to-peer learning facilitated by the ever-growing CCRI network will be vital in this transition phase. Concrete examples of successful implementation of circular systemic solutions will bring knowledge and value to local and regional actors well beyond the initiative.
The efforts will be further accentuated by the CCRI Knowledge Hub launched this year. It strives to foster knowledge-sharing, mentoring and capacity building within the CCRI community and beyond. By gathering evidence-based results from projects, the already available knowledge base will be consolidated and expanded. Moreover, communities of practice are being set up on selected topics to further enhance knowledge exchange and peer-to-peer learning on specific issues. The topics are yet to be disclosed.
Unlocking the circular value
Financing circular solutions is a commonly acknowledged hurdle. The business potential may be harder to illustrate for potential investors, and the return on capital tends to take longer than for business models based on linear economy principles. Making externalities, such as waste and pollution, expensive for companies would help to unlock the full benefits of circularity. But it is also a question of communication and marketing.
Instead of solely focusing on the environmental aspects of what the circular economy and the related business models have to offer, it is important to understand and communicate that circular resource use also helps mitigate key business risks. Closed resource loops decouple businesses from reliance on virgin resources, which often come from outside Europe and are subject to volatile price changes due to global conditions. In the meantime, this contributes to the security of supply.
Moreover, new circular value-creating systems can help us see the sub-optimal nature of the linear economy: in the traditional take-make-dispose model, value is created only once, after which the product is destroyed. It makes not only environmental but also economic sense to design products that never become waste. Keeping the value as high as possible for as long as possible and creating new business models that generate revenue at multiple points is both economically and environmentally beneficial.
In TREASoURcE, we are developing solutions to create value from waste streams that are currently not being utilized, both at the research level and in real-life applications. We evaluate waste streams in plastics, batteries and biobased key value chains to unlock their circular value in the pilot cities and regions across the Baltic Sea region.
We are currently preparing a deliverable report focusing on concrete case examples on how to promote public and private investments, secure funding, engage stakeholders and build investment pipelines regarding the key value chain demos and replications carried out and/or planned in TREASoURcE. The deliverable aims to gather concrete examples about the current landscape of funding opportunities, from both public and private sources, and highlights key areas for future investment by examining successful case studies, innovative financing models and offering insights to drive systemic circular economy solutions.
It’s not what you say, but how you say it
Effective communication and marketing are pivotal in advancing the circular economy. We need to find the unique selling points to translate the benefits and unlock the potential of circular economy. These can vary depending on who we are addressing and demand an understanding of each stakeholder’s perspectives, perceptions and position in the circular economy transition.
This is exactly what we are working on in TREASoURcE. Building on the extensive stakeholder engagement work carried out in WP2, we have been crafting the TREASoURcE Handbook for Effective Communication on Circular Economy, which will be published in the spring. It will provide concrete tips on how to leverage communication to support the circular economy transition, highlighting good practices shared by our partners and presenting some common pitfalls to avoid.
17.12.2024 | Kaisa Simola (CLIC), kaisa.simola@clicinnovation.fi
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