Ensure a transition towards circular economy

Are you interested in Circular Economy issues? Do you want to learn more about cooperation in this field? Do you want more information about Systemic Design and Holistic Diagnosis methods? Then, follow our Interreg Reporter in the backstage of Project Retrace with Agnese Pallaro, member of the Department of Architecture and Design at Politecnico di Torino, lead partner of the project. 

 

Retrace is an environment and resource efficiency project which was born from the finding that wastes were piling in European regions and that reusing them could benefit both the environment and the economy. 

Source: Eurostats

Eight partners from five regions (Piemonte Region in Italy, Bask Country in Spain, Nouvelle-Aquitaine in France, Slovenia and North-East Region in Romania) and two advisory  partners (Holland and Scotland which are at the forefront of Circular Economy) decided to share knowledge in solving the common problem of waste management, even though they face it at a different scale.

The lead partner chose partners from very diverse regions because “it perceives diversity as a richness for the project to foster knowledge sharing in very different situations”. Attention has been paid to the balance between northern-southern and western-eastern regions of Europe and their diversity in terms of level of governance, culture, management policy, size and knowledge about circular economy. Within bigger regions themselves, you can also experience those differences. 

Still, they all share the problem of very toxic waste coming from Agri-food industry, technological and technical industry, fashion industry, aeronautical industry... 

 

The partnership born from the common challenge of waste management decided to tackle it from a circular economy perspective, where outputs of some products become inputs in a new production chain. Therefore, the lead partner of the project, Politecnico di Torino, presented its Systemic Design approach, which they shared with the first partner to join the project: Azaro Fundazioa in Bask Country

Screenshot from the second Field Visit video in Nouvelle-Aquitaine

According to Agnese Pallaro, Systemic Design approach enables to adress the issue as a system of interconnections to identify solutions to key issues that would be sustainable in a long-term basis. The idea is to connect local stakeholders affected by the issue of waste (including companies, people, cities and towns representatives…) on a territory to get more comprehensive solutions. 

To have a better grounding on the territory scale of the Systemic Design theory, the partnership has already fulfilled six Field Visits and identified more than 50 good practices. 

 

How were these good practices identified and fit to the regions’ criticalities?

The Holistic Diagnosis allowed to build a clear picture of the socio-cultural, economic and environmental situation of each region and made sure that its resources were in line with the actions foreseen in the policy instruments addressed. Find below the economic part of the Holistic Diagnosis for Slovenia:

In many cases, but not all of them, the Good Practices selected referred to the main production and economic sectors in the regions identified in the Holistic Diagnosis. That is the case in Slovenia, where one of the good practices comes from the construction industry, one of the most important economic sector in the country.

The Good Practice Wintherwax aims at adressing different issues concerning windows coating in the construction sector. Most of houses in Slovenia have synthetic coating for windows, which is harmful for the environment and the larch used for windows is usually imported from Siberia. But, at the same time, Slovenia's territory is at 60% covered by forests, and wood industry has a very low-added value.

Screenshot from the fifth Retrace Field Visit video in Slovenia

The systemic Design approach combined all these different factors to come to the conclusion that wood wastes had to be reused and transformed into high quality products. 

Screenshot from the fifth Retrace Field Visit video in Slovenia

 

But how did the partners from the project succeed in the making of the Holistic Diagnosis and in the application of Systemic Design methodology at the local level? 

Through the involvement of stakeholders! Retrace project’s stakeholders come from over 70 public and private entities. They are ranging from museums to reuse and recycle centres, and to innovation clusters… As they are the ones who will be influenced by the outcome of the project, they have an essential role in defining regions’ potentialities and issues, and actions to be implemented to improve local situation. They take part in stakeholders’ group meetings, participate to regional dissemination events and cooperate (by suggesting interesting cases or by presenting some themselves) in identifying local Good Practices and participate to field visits (at least two stakeholders per region). 

For any further information on Retrace and how it tackles circular economy, visite the project website.