News

The Circular Materials Conference – the leading Nordic forum for industrial, scientific and commercial progress in the circular use of materials offered a great opportunity for Marcus from project partner BayFOR to present the project. The onsite event took place in Skellefteå, Sweden on September 14-15, 2022, with leading circular economy innovators from industry and academia.

Alongside the two familiar projects CIRCULAR FoodPack and NONTOX , Marcus presented the latest results of Circular Flooring in the breakout session ‘Innovation Deep Dive’. The discussions have shown that not only Circular Flooring’s innovation is and will be facing the challenge of acquiring enough waste material through efficient collection schemes but also social behaviour. This encompasses first the willingness of the waste producers to take the effort and bring the material to collection sites or pay for the related logistic services on the one hand and eventual fees for storing the material, for example. Second, the consumers’ market acceptance of flooring that contains secondary material plays a crucial role in our business model assessments. Given the current circumstances of rising energy prices and limited availability, it needs to be investigated whether this reduces the willingness to pay for virgin or secondary material and what this implies as a consequence for Circular Flooring. Hence, dedicated awareness rising on the topic and the impact of each citizen’s purchasing decision is essential.

Another key takeaway of the conference is the urgent need to create synergies. Synergies between the stakeholders along specific waste stream value chains, as well as synergies between different value chains to be able to detect opportunities for one’s trash being the other one’s treasure. Therefore, multi-actor approaches such as in the Circular Flooring project and (local) innovation clusters (as e.g. outside of Skellefteå) are key to taking the European circular economy forward.