No Waste, Only Resources
07 May 2021 - Published by Elisabeth Krey Jenssen
As a part of the Interreg project CIRC in the North Sea Region we held an international webinar about the challenges of a circular economy in Helsingborg on the 26th of November 2020.
The webinar was called No Waste, Only Resources and 57 people from the Northsea region attended.
We talked about:
- A unique separating waste water system that are being built for 300 apartments, office buildings, a school and a hotel. The city of Helsingborg will use it for the next 5000 apartments and 5000 workplaces as well.
- A new way to cooperate when we collect resources in the city - a House of Resources. If this pilot works well, we would like to use this model in new areas of the City.
- Design and circular economy – will it really work? Our goal is No Waste - Only Resources, but will we ever get there? A view from our knowledge partner professor Hervé Corvellec in our project.
The speakers and the expert panel can be viewed below:
Our expert panel Ingrid Zeegers from Circulair Frieslandand Sofie Karlsborn from IKEA gave us an international outlook and respond to our challenges.
We got some new insights from the discussions at the webinar:
- For instance, that you don't need a common goal to cooperate successfully with actors from the public, private and idea-driven sector. But you have to understand and consider the internal agendas of the different actors. You also have to trust the different actors to have a circular economy mindset, where the common vison is that the processes should be able to continue forever.
- The collaboration can be easier if the actors are in your own proximity. Still if you are a local actor, it's good to have an understanding for the need of generalized solutions for large international companies, because they can't interact with a lot of different local systems.
- It's also important to ask yourself, what is actually circulating in your solution? Does your circular solution just make it harder for another actor, or on a different level in a system?
- There's also a time aspect to be considered, when we talk about circular economy.
The whole webinar is available as a film here.