Innovation Project

Circular City Challenge 2.0

Circular City Challenge 2.0 1080 810 Circonnact

The Circular City Challenge is an innovation project by Circonnact, Circular Berlin, Circular Munich and Materialkreislauf that aims to bring circular solutions to cities. The goal is to support their implementation locally and to increase the quality of life by contributing to climate neutrality and urban transformation. After the success in 2022, the project will be continued in Berlin, Vienna, Munich and Stuttgart and expanded to additional cities.

As the circular economy is a key instrument to achieve climate neutrality, we get support from the Klima-Innovationsfond Stuttgart to extend the challenge to expand the network of circular-minded cities.

To increase the implementation probability, we will invest more time determining and specifying the challenges with the local partners, including trainings and workshops for communes to understand the circular economy better, find international solution providers, and help them with the matchmaking with city or district representatives. In parallel, we will develop a guidebook to establish the challenge as a regular event.

Please see here for more information.

Currently, we are looking for partners from cities, districts, or neighborhoods who are willing to find and implement circular solutions locally. Contact Andreas Ellenberger via andreas (at) circonnact.world for more information.

Embrace – Regenerative Tourism Implementation Support

Embrace – Regenerative Tourism Implementation Support 1400 900 Circonnact

Since March 2023, Vanessa Vivian Wabitsch from Circonnact has had the honor of supporting the implementation of the Destination regeneration plan by Whidbey and Camano Islands Tourism, Washington State, USA as Regenerative Tourism Lead with the Transformational Travel Council. 

In 2022, Whidbey and Camano Island Tourism started their journey to develop future-fit islands by regenerative development by tourism. They joined the Destination Regeneration program by the Transformational Travel Council as early adopters and developed the destination regeneration plan “EMBRACE – A Vision and Approach to our Desired Future for Whidbey and Camano Islands”. 

What does it take to bring the destination regeneration plan to life?

  • People who are motivated to implement the vision and plan
  • Very good collaboration and relationships among the team and with community members and other stakeholders
  • Strategy implementation plan and tools to enable self-organized co-work, coherent and effective processes
  • Capacity building, training, and co-design with the local community
  • Creativity, presence, aligned action.

We work on all of these aspects and are excited to support the pioneers to take the bold step and create the desired future for their place with the regenerative approach.

Interested in learning more and how you can develop your desired future by regenerative tourism, innovation, and leadership? Contact Vanessa Vivian Wabitsch via vanessa (at) circonnact.world .

Circular City Challenge 1.0

Circular City Challenge 1.0 1080 810 Circonnact

The Circular City Challenge is a project to connect existing innovative circular solutions with city representatives for the transition of a linear to a circular economy. The goal is to support their implementation locally and to increase the quality of life with conscious and careful use of resources. In 2022 this project has been started by Circonnact as local coordinators for Vienna with the organizers of Circular Berlin, Circular Munich and Materialkreislauf in the cities of Berlin, Vienna, Munich and Stuttgart.

We identified local challenges together with local partners like the DoTank Circular City and WieNeu+ for city development, representatives from the 8th district (Bezirksvorstehung Josefstadt & Agenda Josefstadt), and project developers such as Zukunftshof and dieHauswirtschaft. Local promotion partners like Impact Hub, Vienna Business Agency, The Mall, What about the Future, Circular Economy Forum Austria and Thinkubator helped to spread the word and activate their network to distribute the idea.

During inspiring webinars supported by Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Circle Economy and the Circular Economy Chairman for Prague we gathered momentum and motivated more than 100 applications of solutions at least in the status of implementation concept. The local partner chose their most appealing ideas and at the end of April which will be pitched. One important factor is that we are not looking for “the best solution” because we think every applicant already is a winner.

We support to implement the solutions by providing visibility of the solutions and engaging stakeholders such as city representatives, companies and citizens. In Vienna, we organize the final event “Circular City Challenge – Wie sieht deine Stadt von morgen aus?” on 9 & 10 June 2022 in the center of Vienna at The Mall to showcase the variety of circular solutions, activate their uptake, educate and connect companies, citizens and city stakeholders.

If you want to support us in further developing the project, please contact Andreas or Vanessa.

Training Business Centers to consult on Circular Economy

Training Business Centers to consult on Circular Economy 1200 956 Circonnact

Micro and small companies represent the majority of businesses in most of the countries, and drivers of innovation and development of the economy. So it is important for them to understand and integrate circular economy solutions into their business. But how to address this in the best way, given that they often lack time to look in depth into the opportunities? If employees in the Business Centers and Agencies supporting these small companies understand what Circular Economy means, that would ensure that they integrate this thinking into their approach when consulting the small enterprises.

This is a project which Onda Circular, a Latin American organization, was leading with Sercotec in Chile from April to August 2021. They offer a platform for capacity building of the employees of >60 business centers nationwide and facilitated workshops to understand circular behavior with more than 400 employees attending. Andreas Ellenberger was supporting this project, facilitating workshops where the Business Centers were developing an initial life cycle analysis and circular business model canvas for one of their local companies to understand the opportunities if they apply circular solutions.

Equipped with that knowledge they worked with the entrepreneurs, how integrating the circular economy approaches, communicating their solution and finding additional partners for collaboration can contribute to the development of the small companies. In videos they presented the cases and have their own guideline to train, consult and inspire further entrepreneurs in their community. And as Chile has developed a national Circular Economy roadmap, they can contribute to a broader implementation.

Do you want to have impact in companies in your region? Contact Andreas! We develop programs locally to support the change to a circular society. Do you need an inspirational workshop, want to develop a program on capacity building or develop local circular solutions? Our services include different ways forward.

Wandering Gliders – Travel inspired by Nature

Wandering Gliders – Travel inspired by Nature 1920 1280 Circonnact

Circonnact is developing solutions to empower people, companies and destinations in the transition to a more regenerative way of traveling.

How can we travel in a regenerative and circular way that is low-carbon? At the beginning of the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, Cironnact decided to look into nature to explore this topic further and develop solutions. In the context of the European Biomimicry Design Challenge organized by COBIOM and the Biomimicry Global Design Challenge by the Biomimicry Institute, a team of biomimicry, business, research, communication and graphic design specialists went through a nature-inspired innovation process and developed the concept of a regenerative and nature-inspired travel hub called Wandering Gliders.

Wandering Gliders addresses the problem of excessive traveling that is harming the environment, communities and health of people. It is in our nature to move and travel, but people lack awareness as well as access to appealing and sustainable travel. Travel is amongst the largest industries in the world and can be a key driver to activate people, business and governments to restore the ecosystems if it is done in a regenerative way.

The regenerative and nature-inspired travel project Wandering Gliders aims to empower people and companies on the way to regenerative traveling. Wandering Gliders co-creates exciting and meaningful travel experiences to reconnect with nature, people and oneself and by that contribute positively to a flourishing environment and communities. It raises awareness, provides tools for impactful travel experiences and supports travel business to rebuild in a regenerative way with training, co-creating solutions and consulting. The project is developing two pilots with partners The Lionheart Experience in South Africa and the Green Festival organized by Biomimicry Granada, Esada, Utrecht University and Cobiom. Furthermore, Wandering Gliders is collaborating with KPRN, Sustain & Sustain Safaris in South Africa, Sustainability and Resilience Institute New Zealand and Whale Watch Tenerife.

How to travel regeneratively? Check out the Regenerative Travel Principles and Regenerative Travel Guide by Wandering Gliders.

Join us and be part of the transformation of the travel industry towards regenerative travel!

For more information contact Vanessa Wabitsch via email vanessa (at) circonnact.world .

Waste2Resource Marketplace Cyrkl

Waste2Resource Marketplace Cyrkl 1920 1280 Circonnact

Circonnact supports the market entry in Austria of Cyrkl – Central Europe’s largest Waste2Resource marketplace 

One important element of the circular economy is the change of perspective for waste. Waste is quite often a valuable resource in the wrong place; this is one of the basic assumptions of the Cradle to Cradle concept which guides us when it comes to design of products for a circular economy. However, currently a lot of resources are treated as waste and end up in landfill or incineration, thus destroying their value. To change this we worked with Cyrkl, a Greentech startup operating the largest waste to resource marketplace in Central Europe. They combine expertise in circular waste management with artificial intelligence supported IT infrastructure to match recyclers and secondary material users to companies who have not found solutions for their excess materials yet.

Circonnact supported their market entry in Austria and German speaking region with marketing expertise and insights into the needs of companies in Austria to use the platform. Cyrkl and Circonnact share the mission to connect partners and transform waste to resources. Cyrkl analyses the companies’ current waste management, identifies better solutions to either avoid waste, find partners who upgrade the current waste materials to be reused or just identify internal optimization. It is impressive to see results – their customers achieved savings up to 450.000 Euro per year by re-valuing materials and redesigning flows, and huge amounts of CO2 emissions have been reduced as well by using secondary materials instead of new ones.

It is interesting to see that, while in Austria the recycling and incineration of waste is quite advanced, the usage of secondary material is still not very common. As the regulation with the EU Circular Economy Action Plan will require more and more usage of recycled materials a lot of companies have not thought through where they could replace or at least blend virgin material with recycled material without compromising the quality of their product. Recycling and reuse are just two out of a broad range of the circular strategies that Circonnact is looking into to identify the potential for circularity for companies.

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