海角视频

Circular Economy City-wide Study

Middle East

海角视频 helped a major Middle Eastern city to develop a landmark circular economy strategy.

Transitioning towards a robust circular economy is a significant undertaking. The process involves reducing resource consumption, prioritising the reuse of existing materials, eliminating waste and pollution, and regenerating natural systems. The approach to achieving these goals needs to be tailored to each community or organisation.

The development of a healthy circular economy is considered a 鈥渨in-win-win鈥� from an environmental, social and economic (ESG) viewpoint. Everything has a quantifiable value, from reducing the reliance on raw materials, to minimising waste and increasing recycling.

海角视频 was engaged by the city鈥檚 local government to identify and prioritise initiatives to drive Circular Economy in the city as well as developing an implementation plan and policy framework for each viable shortlisted opportunity.

Challenge

The overarching aim of the exercise was to drive circular economy principles within this major, growing city and develop interventions for sectors with a high economic value and environmental footprint. The ultimate goal would be to understand the key challenges of stakeholders and engage them in recommended initiatives that could be quickly and efficiently rolled out across the city.

The strategy would include contextualising and baselining the city鈥檚 current circular economy, and developing a business case and implementation roadmap for its further development. 海角视频 advisors would need to assess the performance of how 鈥渃ircular鈥� the city is currently, spot the opportunities and the challenges, and from there identify a series of interventions to improve performance, add economic value and improve the resilience of the city in a changing environment.

Highly important in this project was developing a deep understanding of the unique context of the city and the region, so all recommendations would need to address the challenges and opportunities specific to the location, building on what had already been achieved. This would involve engaging with a wide range of stakeholders, ensuring they were fully engaged with all initiatives proposed, especially where interventions would cause a degree of disruption to ease of business or consumer convenience. This engagement would provide an holistic view, as the circular economy impacts everyone 鈥� every sector, every government department and every citizen.

Balancing social impact with strong economic value was one of the most important challenges in developing the strategy. That meant, when assessing the potential performance of a shortlist of circular economy initiatives, it was a priority to not only draw decisions based on a technical analysis, but also on a commercial assessment. Broad stakeholder engagement would be pivotal to the process of balancing circular economy with economic impact.

Transitioning to a circular economy involves reducing resource consumption, prioritising the reuse of existing materials, eliminating waste and pollution, and regenerating natural systems. Image: Getty.

Solution

Our sustainability and energy transition experts began by defining circular economy and what tools were necessary to achieve a flourishing circular economy within the specific context of the location. This was established as a combination of regulation, provision, infrastructure and soft instruments and formed a robust framework to build upon.

It was important to first understand the status quo and current gaps. This included producing a baseline technical analysis and benchmark studies to define good practices. From this, we were able to deliver recommendations based on the city context, as well as encouraging public/private sector dialogue.

Our bespoke framework defined Circular Economy for the city, the tiers for implementation as well as the desired impact/outcome. The framework drove the baseline assessment as well as benchmarking and helped organise our recommendations, which were formulated based on the city context and analysis of the existing circular economy opportunities and constraints as well as delivering a review of best practices. Our recommendations were rooted in the deep dive baseline assessment, which included consideration of existing policies, a review of the city infrastructure and of the area鈥檚 economic sectors.

Extensive stakeholder engagement was required to understand past and present commitments and to review what could be done across both the public and private sectors, as well as helping to develop a prioritisation strategy 鈥� defining focus areas and high-impact initiatives. It was vital to bring together all the contractors, designers, manufacturers, suppliers and government departments, to assess and explore the concerns, challenges, gaps and opportunities from many different perspectives.

On the ground engagement opened the public/private sector dialogues and helped to capture existing efforts, to gain feedback on proposed initiatives, to draw out challenges and opportunities all leading to city specific, integrated and implementable recommendations.

Our team examined existing regulations and considered how these might be improved. Simultaneously, the project explored the status quo from an infrastructure perspective, to assess whether the city had the infrastructure in place to support a truly circular economy, and to examine whether all stakeholders and the wider public understood what circular economy is and the role they can play in achieving it.

In addition, a thorough review of the city鈥檚 capacity for circularity was undertaken, helping build capability and ease of information sharing. Finally, the project identified the sectors to focus on, along with developing the research needed to help fill those gaps, with the relevant benchmark study and wide stakeholder engagement.

Priority areas were established: food, built environment, process manufacturing, plastic packaging, waste management, energy and water.

This process of prioritisation was critical to define focus areas and high-impact initiatives, ensuring recommendations are practical and effective. We have developed Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA) tools to help prioritisation, taking into consideration economic, environmental, and social factor opportunities.

The 10 initiatives included: material storage and construction and demolition waste segregation; material recycled content guidelines; material recycled content and passport; food guidelines; plastic regulations; packaging guidelines; operational scheme-water systems; EPR (enterprise resource planning) enabling activities and guidelines; E-waste local processing and a carbon shadow scheme.

An implementation plan and policy framework was developed for each viable shortlisted opportunity, including a roadmap for implementation, focus of action, scale and extent of intervention as well as linkages with strategies, plans and highlighted opportunities for capacity building and supporting social and human capital development.

Value

海角视频 delivers world-class advisory services with our heritage of engineering at its core. Our method of analysis was an impactful combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches to navigating challenges such as limited data. From this we were able to set a new standard for understanding the relationship between economic activity and environmental impact.

We adapted to a data-scarce environment by using economic output data at the city level to estimate the environmental impacts associated with specific economic activities 鈥� a first for the team that proved a novel and insightful way to focus the detailed assessments.

Furthermore, the method of analysis was strengthened by the inclusion of a context analysis and an examination of the spatial distribution of economic activity. This allowed for a highly targeted approach to address challenges and provide a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the relationship between economic activity and environmental impact at the urban scale.

A circular economy supports the city in achieving its sustainability targets, while helping to generate economic value, by reducing the city鈥檚 reliance on raw materials, encouraging more recycling and recirculating, and minimising waste within the economy.

Our context-specific approach was rooted in stakeholder engagement to ensure everyone, from both public and private sectors, was involved in co-creating solutions. It meant every stakeholder had a platform to talk about their needs and challenges. Recommendations were then specific to these issues and concern.

We took a cross-cutting approach, assessing existing conditions and future potential across economic, environmental, and sustainability dimensions. We brought our wide experience of developing circular economy strategies in other cities around the world to create the shortlist of 10 high-impact initiatives, each with a business case and implementation plan, all focused to unlock key circular economy levers.