In the European context, cities and regions play a key role in boosting circularity and achieve the European Green Deal action plan ambition to ‘boost the efficient use of resources by moving to a clean, circular economy’. To this end, cities and regions will be instrumental in promoting circularity through engagement with key actors and integration of circular economy (CE) goals within their policies and spatial plans. To support this effort, it is essential to develop appropriate metrics and tools for evaluating the progress and transition towards a circular economy. Although numerous new assessment methodologies have been suggested (Corona et al., 2019), they generally focus on quantitatively assessing how circular a project, system, or business is, or on evaluating the extent to which circular strategies align with the principles of a circular economy. Current metrics rarely extend beyond material sustainability assessments, which means they often do not capture the complexity of the CE transition and lack a comprehensive, integrated perspective. In particular, what they omit are the spatial (Williams, 2020), the governance (Korhonen et al., 2018) and the social dimensions (Pitkänen et al., 2020). In this paper, we propose a holistic transition assessment tool developed and tested across several metropolitan regions, including Amsterdam, Naples, Łódź, Hamburg and Pécs, being at different stages of the circular economy transition. The final version of the tool was applied in two cases, the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area and the city of Tomaszów Mazowiecki. The tool focuses on five dimensions: (1) governance structures, (2) awareness, comprehensiveness of the sustainability assessment, (3) tools for measuring material stocks and flows as well as (4) for co-creation of solutions and strategies with stakeholders, and (5) circular built environment. The results of applying the tool in a series of workshops with regional CE stakeholders allow for exploring the following questions: What is the state of the transition towards CE in European urban regions from a holistic perspective? What hinders these transitions? And how to identify means to overcome those barriers? The assessment tool is of interest for regional and urban policy-makers, planners and stakeholders engaged in development of CE strategies and policies. What is more, the results presented in the paper allow for comparative insights into the state of transition towards CE and for drawing lessons on what it takes to nudge the development of regions and cities towards circularity.@en

Food waste represents the largest fraction of the municipal solid waste generated in Europe and its management is associated to suboptimal performance in environmental, health, and social dimensions. By processing detailed multi-fold local data as part of a comprehensive and broadly understandable sustainability framework, this study quantifies the environmental and socio-economic impacts of household food waste management in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area based on priorities set by local stakeholders. Five alternative short-term management options have been assessed against the current system, relying on poor separate collection and incineration. Four options involve separate collection of food waste followed by biological treatments (home/centralised composting and anaerobic digestion) while one involves a mix of separate collection and centralised mechanical-biological treatment followed by anaerobic digestion. Among these, separate collection followed by anaerobic digestion coupled with effective nutrient and energy recovery is, according to our findings, the preferred option to improve the sustainability of the current system in all dimensions considered, except for the economic pillar due to the collection costs. Home and centralised composting as well as mechanical-biological treatment are associated to more adverse impacts based on our findings. The study informs local stakeholders and authorities on the potential consequences of their options, thereby allowing them to make sound choices for a future waste and circular economy strategy.@en

Waste management represents a challenge for public authorities due to many reasons such as increased waste generation following urban population growth, economic burdens imposed on the municipal budget, and nuisances inevitably caused to the environment and local inhabitants. To optimize the system from a sustainability perspective, moving the transition towards a more circular economy, a better understanding of the different stages of waste management is necessary. A review of recently developed sustainability frameworks for waste management showed that no single framework captures all the instruments needed to ultimately provide a solid basis for comprehensive analyses of the potential burdens associated with urban waste management. Bearing this limitation in mind, the objective of this research is to propose a conceptual and comprehensive sustainability framework to support decision-making in waste management of European cities. The framework comprises a combination of methods capable of identifying future strategies and scenarios, to assess different types of impacts based on a life cycle perspective, and considers the value of waste streams, the actors involved, and possible constraints of implementing scenarios. The social, economic, environmental, technical and political domains are covered, and special attention is paid to impacts affecting foremost the local population.@en

Deliverable 3.3 of Work Package 3 concerns an integrated analysis of the two pilot case studies within the REPAiR project, Amsterdam and Naples, from the vantage point of waste production and processing, and the transition to circular societies. It comprises spatial, social and material flow analyses of the two pilot cases, whilst testing an innovative methodology that was introduced and explained in Deliverable 3.1 [D3.1, AKA the Handbook, Geldermans et al., 2017]. The report addresses additions and clarifications to the methodology presented in Deliverable 3.1. After an update on the basis of technical insights and the work developed in practice within the peri-urban living labs (PULL) workshops carried out so far, an improved classification of Wastescapes is presented. Furthermore, a complete process model to map Wastescapes is provided. A smaller scale of the 'sample' area has been introduced to allow a better interaction with the local stakeholders, deepening the context and cutting into the intermediate scale of the ‘focus-area’. Moreover, the notion of Enabling Contexts is applied to rationalise the links between spatial analysis and eco-innovation solutions (WP5). With regard to the Material Flow Analysis, new insights on data collection and processing are addressed, providing more grip on how to successfully conduct such an MFA. The lion’s share of the report is allocated to presenting the results. For both cases, a rudimentary spatial and socio-economic analysis on a national level precedes a detailed regional analysis: for the Netherlands, this concerns the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area, and for Italy the Campania Region and the Metropolitan region of Naples. Embedded in this spatial-social context, the material flow analysis follows six Activity-based Spatial MFA (as introduced in D3.1) steps to pinpoint and analyse waste related challenges and activities. The report finishes with a reflection on the methodology and results. This reflection focuses on four topics in particular: physico-geographical aspects and waste-sensitivity, Waste(scape) dynamics in space & time, modelling of material flows & data intensity, and the relevance of Enabling Contexts, whilst anticipating the follow up cases as well as a wider field of application.@en