Chile's Road to Circular Economy - European Strategies and Vision
On the 23rd of July, a webinar on Chile's Road to Circular Economy took place.
Freek van Eijk Director of Holland Circular Hotspot and Ladeja Godina Košir talked about opportunities, circular economy brings and challenges that need to be tackled. They exchanged their thoughts and knowledge from Dutch and Slovenian perspectives.
Key takeaways from the webinar:
In uncertain times that we live in today, good crisis management is extremely important, as is long term vision. The circular economy is offering us great tools to achieve resilience and nevertheless to achieve SDGs - so let’s do it on a systemic level and let's engage a variety of stakeholders.
When thinking about circular solutions, there are 3 levels to be considered:
1) Supply-side solutions
2) Demand-side solutions
3) Nature-based solutions
Maintaining value is always in the focus and shift towards more sustainable production and consumption shall lead to decisionmaking processes. To do so, orchestration of interests and alignment on shared values and goals play a critical role. Stakeholder engagement - Governance - Leadership are essential for making circular change reality, to move from preaching to implementing circular solutions.
Keeping in mind that there are a lot of circular challenges, but at the same time there are a lot of circular opportunities as well. Namely, look at what some start-ups are already doing to exploit circular food opportunities: Vegetarian Butcher, PROTIX, Surplus Food Factory.
Inspiration from Freek Van Eijk:
Make and use products smarter: Refuse-rethink-reduce
Product and parts life extension: Reuse-repair-refurbish-remanufacture-repurpose
Valorization of materials: Recycle-recover
Special thanks to Linette Solway Director of Technology Transfer and Circular Economy at Fundación Eurochile, for moderating the webinar.
If you missed it, you can watch the webinar here.
Additionally, we invite you to read the interview by Eurochile with Ladeja Godina Košir.