ProCirc

ProCirc deep dive at the North Sea Conference 2022

07 July 2022 - Published by Lisanne van ‘t Hoff
The North Sea Conference is organized annually by the North Sea Commission and the North Sea Region Programme. This year the conference took place from 23rd-25th of May in Bruges. As ProCirc is funded by the North Sea Region Interreg Programme, lead partner Rijkswaterstaat was present at the Conference. Participants from the whole North Sea area had travelled to Bruges to network, learn about the new Interreg programme and learn from others. The programme was divers, with workshops on Fit for 55, trends in the North Sea region and inspiring lectures from a documentary maker and a journalist. The target audiences were policymakers, SME’s, stakeholders from current and future projects.

At the start of the conference, eight projects from the North Sea Region Programme were given the opportunity to pitch their project results to the audience. ProCirc was among the happy few to get selected. The task given was to ‘tease’ the audience in an active way in only six minutes. Project manager Lyke Bosma took the stage as the second project. Given that the previous project had fabricked small stools, Lyke used this to explain circularity: the stool from the previous pitch wasn’t thrown away, nor disassembled for recycling, but used by someone else in its original function. Lyke continued to stress the importance of procurement in the Circular Economy and ask the audience (around 100-200 people) to stand up if they are a procurer. ProCirc mainly targets procurers, but as expected no-one raised, as a procurer would be unlikely to attend the North Sea Conference. Fortunately some people in the audience raised following the question as who would know procurement-colleagues in their organization.

The core message of the deep dive pitch was to encourage the audience to rethink on their procuring activities and to support their procuring colleagues moving into circular procurement. The results from ProCirc are of great help here. The Conference provided a good opportunity to intrigue people not familiar with circular procurement. During the breaks that day and the following two days, also during workshops, circular procurement was discussed as well.