Circular Gothenburg

Examples of action:

• Fixotek: Staffed facilities, close to where people live, open to everyone. Where people can meet, learn, repair and redesign stuff, borrow tools, swap toys, clothes and books.
• Reuse and redesign of furniture in the city.
• Public procurement for circular flows in the construction and demolition process: A nation funded project run during 2019, Providing recommendations and suggestions on how procurement requirements can be formulated to push for circular construction and demolition.

Key success factors:

• City administrations:
  • Give the city’s administrations guidelines and good settings for circular transition
  • Provide assistance for the purchase and procurement of circular products/ services
  • Communicate the possibilities and benefits of circular products/services.
• Citizens:
  • Encourage and help the City’s administrations to use their own resources to help residents by:
    • Supporting the activities of others and developing their own.
    • Collaborate, test and scale up new circular activities and activities.
• Business Sector:
  • Collaborate to find attractive and functioning relationships between sustainable production and consumption.
  • Help to develop constructive and clear procurement requirements for circular products/services that can contribute to the transition.

Key learnings, challenges and opportunities:

• Make the transition easy, obvious and attractive
• Municipalities are important actors that can speed up the transition from a linear to a circular economy
• Cross-border strategies and collaboration are needed – together is a keyword both within the municipality and between different stakeholders
• Moving from pre-study to implementation and from niche to mainstream is a real challenge
• There was a great response and interest from other, many want to act.

Organisation: City of Gothenburg

How long has the project been operational: Since 2016.