CircuLaw is revolutionizing how municipalities implement circular economy policies. This open source platform is making it easier for cities to adopt sustainable practices by leveraging legal frameworks.
As Europe intensifies its push towards a sustainable future, a groundbreaking tool is emerging to help municipalities navigate the complex landscape of circular economy regulations. CircuLaw, an innovative open source platform, is simplifying the implementation of circular economy policies.
CircuLaw is providing public sector stakeholders with new ways to navigate and implement circular economy policies through an open source platform that unveils legal instruments that support such policies. Recently, they have published mappings for five laws in the EU Green New Deal, enhancing their utility for policy implementation.
Understanding the Circular Economy
But before diving into the codebase, a reminder of what a circular economy is might be handy. A circular economy is an economic model focused on minimizing waste and making the most of resources. It involves rethinking product life cycles with the six Rs in the R-ladder: refuse, reduce, reuse, repair, recycle, and recover, thereby creating a closed-loop system that reduces environmental impact and fosters sustainability.
Municipalities and the Circular Economy
Municipalities are increasingly striving towards a circular economy to enhance sustainability, reduce waste, and optimize resource use. By integrating circular principles into urban planning, procurement, and waste management, cities aim to create closed-loop systems that recycle materials and extend the lifecycle of products. This shift not only addresses environmental challenges but also fosters economic resilience and innovation. However, implementing such policies and regulations has been challenging due to the complexity of coordinating multiple stakeholders, adjusting existing infrastructures, and ensuring compliance with evolving legal frameworks.
The Role of CircuLaw
Enter CircuLaw. By systematically reviewing and explaining different legal instruments and how they can be used to increase circularity, it suddenly becomes much easier for policymakers to create the right environment for the circular economy to grow. Concretely, it looks at a topic area, lists different instruments that can be used to make it more circular, with metadata covering legal validity, magnitude of influence, government level to use it, and which parts of the R-ladder it uses. Thanks to filtering it gets easier to find the instruments useful for a certain situation.
As the codebase started in Amsterdam, it specifically looked at legal instruments possible to use in a Dutch context. But recently, they started adding in regulations and directives from the EU. Arjan Hassing, project lead at Amsterdam Gemeente, explains: "It turns out that 80% of the regulations affecting the municipalities originate in the EU."
EU Green New Deal and CircuLaw
A specific grant allowed them to work on the different initiatives in the Green New Deal, such as the Single-Use Plastics Directive, Energy Efficiency Directive, and Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation. As part of the work, they made a mapping of all the laws, what stage they are in, and which of the EU packages they are referenced in. When they were using that visualization in presentations, many people asked them to share it. That is why they created this overview PDF with links to all laws and shared it on LinkedIn. "But I hadn't expected that it would become so viral!" says Gurden Batra, developer at Dark Matter Labs, one of the partners in the CircuLaw project. "We will make a more interactive web version of this later this year."
CircuLaw’s Growing Impact
CircuLaw is already being used in several municipalities and agencies in the Netherlands, but both Hassing and Batra note that "lawmaking is a slow process" and to see concrete results will take time. Despite that, they both mention enthusiastic feedback from different stakeholders in the Netherlands. Batra says, "It was always the intention that the codebase should be scalable. We hope to see this used in other countries and even for other transitions, like the energy transition."
Future Prospects
To enable this, the development is purposefully being done on three levels: the code of the platform itself, working on the policy, and the methodology, and all are being shared in the open. The idea is that the various parts should be possible to reuse, even if one doesn't need the whole package. However, more organizations are very welcome to join the project, which is being run in a novel partnership and collaboration rather than a regular procurement.
Award winning?
CircuLaw was recently nominated to the Gouden Zandloper award (Golden Hourglass) in the ESG (Environmental, Social & Governance) category. "It's a nice recognition for the whole team just to be nominated", says Hassing. "If this can also make more people find CircuLaw, it would be great, as we haven't made a lot of marketing efforts yet." We wish the team good luck with that!