Policy — Articles — Harvard Circular Economy Symposium

IDEAL-CITIES: A Trustworthy and Sustainable Framework for Circular Smart Cities

by Giorgos Dimitriou & Vasilis Katos

One of the main challenges of a modern smart city is to bring people together, making them ambassadors of a sustainable, restorative and regenerative way of life and expediting the shift to the Circular Economy model. A city achieving a smart city status cannot be automatically considered sustainable nor inclusive. A Sentient City achieves sustainability of the resources and inclusiveness for the people.

This paper from IDEAL CITIES, a European Union-funded project, examines how smart city technologies can promote a data-driven circular economy model. Under this framework, a city's finite resources as well as citizens will form the pool of intelligent assets in order to contribute to high utilization through crowdsourcing and real-time decision making and planning. For instance, by helping the visually impaired citizens navigate and productively enjoy their city, services becoming enabled to respond in real-time and in the most cost-effective manner by identifying and repurposing resources with a minimum effort. A data-driven sentient city will know when it has achieved its goals because it will at the same time measure one of the most important performance indicators: citizen’s happiness.

Plastic, Artic, PolicyMitsue GuerreroJanuary 22, 2020artic, waste, plastic, sea, policy

Creating A Circular Economy with Less Plastic Waste - Implications and Gaps in the International Trade of Plastic Waste

by Quinn Liu

The Basel Convention was amended in 2019 to include plastic waste as hazardous wastes with restrictions for international trade. The amendment will make global trade in plastic waste more transparent and better regulated, whilst also ensuring that its management is safer for human health and the environment. These international trade policy changes signal a transition towards a more resource efficient and circular economy, which can occur at various levels along the product value chain such as second-hand goods, end-of-life products, secondary materials or waste, as well as trade in related services. In this paper, Quinn Liu highlights gaps and opportunities in updating the existing regulatory framework and re-designing the global supply chain to transition to a sustainable circular economy.

PolicyMitsue GuerreroJanuary 18, 2020waste, plastic, policy

The ACCTS could be a catalyst for transitioning to a circular economy

by Giridharan Ramasubramanian

The recently announced initiative, the Agreement on Climate Change, Trade and Sustainability (ACCTS), provides a fresh opportunity to use trade agreements to tackle the challenges of climate change and sustainable development. In this piece, Giridharan Ramasubramnian argues that if it wishes to be an influential and effective international grouping, the ACCTS should facilitate the transition to a more circular economy among member countries and successfully shape discussions at the nexus between trade, climate and sustainable development in other international forums and institutions. As a potential institutional pathfinder and a living agreement, the ACCTS could expand in scope by bringing in issues related to the circular economy: the removal of barriers to trade in secondary materials, goods and waste, and the development of guidelines for eco-design and recyclability standards. It could also expand in membership by bringing on board countries that are thinking seriously of transitioning to a circular economy. Thus, the ACCTS has a unique potential to act as a catalyst to a circular economy within member countries’ societies and an institutional catalyst that will drive discussions in other international institutions on the topic of circular economy to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.