plastic — 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

Recapturing the Value of the World’s Trash

by Henrique Pacini and Carrie Snyder

Waste is fundamental to the way our societies work. Moreover, such residues move across borders. So how can we design an economy that closes the loop, produces less waste, and makes sure the materials and energy that are currently discarded are able flow back into productive economic cycles? In this article for the Weatherhead Centre, Henrique Pacini and Carrie Snyder argue that this will require more than technology - and that this goal depends on a confluence of factors, including cooperation among and within countries on things such as taxation / subsidy reforms and multilateral standards which reinforce the governance of materials throughout their lifecycles.

Mitsue GuerreroJanuary 17, 2020trash, plastic, value, materials

Policy Options for an Arctic Plastic Pollution Action Plan

by Katie Segal

Nearly 80 percent of all the plastic waste the world has ever produced is sitting in landfills or polluting the environment, and an estimated 8 million tons of this plastic finds its way to the ocean each year. Despite its remote location and relatively small population, the Arctic region is not immune from the plague of plastic pollution infecting oceans around the world.

2019/20Mitsue GuerreroJanuary 17, 2020waste, plastic, sea, policy, arctic