Circular Economy

The largest share of waste in Switzerland is generated by construction activity. In SWIRCULAR – a five-year Flagship project supported by Innosuisse, five research institutes and 24 industry partners join forces to accelerate the use and interlinkage of digitalization and circular economy in the Swiss construction sector in order to attain a significant transformation of this key economic sector. Together, the project partners aim to establish the first Swiss Circular Construction Digital Ecosystem, demonstrating that this sector transformation is viable and sustainable, and offering new ways of value creation.
SusTec focuses on the value creation from new circular and digitalized solutions co-created by the partners in the Flagship. The traditional construction industry operates in a fixed order wherein value chain partners assume separate roles and apply strong ‘silo-thinking’ to value creation. It is expected that a shift to circular and digitalized construction will significantly transform value creation and division, and value chain operations. SusTec research within SP7 of SWIRCULAR centers on this shift in value creation, together with Berner Fachhochschule.
SusTec uses qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate how the co-created Flagship solutions change value flows (such as money, information, or physical resources) and how these changes in value creation affect actors in the construction sector and the broader stakeholder ecosystem. This regards e.g., patterns of involvement, interaction, and coordination over the different phases of construction projects and over the entire lifecycle. In exploring the (economic) potentials and bottlenecks that arise for different value chain members, SusTec’s research is an important step towards the identification of business models that link circularity strategies (R-strategies) and digitalization in Swiss construction for creating more economic, social, and environmental value.

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The National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Catalysis, jointly led by ETH Zurich and Download EPFL, conducts cutting-edge research in chemical catalysis. A key objective of NCCR Catalysis is to foster the development of carbon-neutral value chains by harnessing renewable resources through catalytic processes, aligning with global efforts to combat climate change and embrace circular economy principles. By examining the entire chemical value chain, the NCCR Catalysis approach disentangles the complexities of chemical processes across various domains. NCCR Catalysis engages in collaborative research across communities and organizations, integrating multidimensional and cross-disciplinary approaches encompassing catalysis, chemistry, materials science, chemical and process engineering, and computer sciences. Through collaborative research efforts and standardized methodologies, NCCR Catalysis is dedicated to advancing solutions that enhance the efficiency, sustainability, and economic viability of chemical processes across diverse industries. This is also the focal point for our group in this NCCR: Understanding how technological advancements to deliver tangible benefits to human health and society can be leveraged, all while upholding environmental responsibility.

Website: Download https://www.nccr-catalysis.ch

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The INCREACE (INCreasing REcycled content in Added value products for a resilient and digitized Circular Economy) project has been funded by the EU Horizon Program. The overarching objective of INCREACE is to enable an increased uptake of recycled plastics in added value products such as EEE (Electrical and Electronic Equipment) through innovative and systemic solutions along the entire recycled plastics value chain. For this purpose, research and innovation actions will be required at each step of the value chain. The project starts with specific design challenges coming from the industry partners that are translated into specific technical, legal, economic and traceability requirements that suppliers of recycled materials have to meet. The INCREACE project partners are world leaders in their respective fields, used to forming long-lasting interdisciplinary and international alliances and are therefore well positioned to tackle missing segments in the plastics recycling value chain, strengthen the EU’s industrial base, and boost its competitiveness and open strategic autonomy on an international level.

Among the participating universities and research organisations in this project are Download KU Leuven, Download Maastricht University and Download Vision on Technology for a better world (VITO).

Website: external page https://increace-project.eu/

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Circular Building Industry Innovation (CBI) Booster, powered by Innosuisse, aims to enable a transition to a circular building industry through systemic and joint innovation. The CBI Booster looks for project ideas that strengthen circular economy within the Swiss building industry. They offer funding, support, a network, events and a communication platform to successful applicants with an idea for a product, service, process or business model relating to circularity in the building industry. Answering the industry need for a collaborative cross value chain approach, the booster brings the Swiss construction and building ecosystem together with key innovation and research hubs in an inspiring and agile setting.  

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To decouple economic growth from increased natural resource use and hence environmental impacts the concept of a Circular Economy (CE) has experienced increased attention. Closing material flows has always been a topic for industry when it comes to high-value materials. Hitherto, a holistic approach on how to manage the transition from a linear to a CE is lacking. The TACLE-project (Towards A sustainable CircuLar Economy) co-led by SusTec and the Ecological Systems Design Group (ESD), aimed at answering these questions by combining a resource perspective (ESD) with a socioeconomic perspective (SusTec). SusTec ventured in this untapped field by applying a policy mix as well as a value chain analysis.

In a first phase, barriers and drivers for a CE were identified. To this end, existing innovations and policy landscapes were analyzed, focusing on exemplary industries, such as the plastic packaging industry, and pioneer countries in terms of related policies. The analysis lead to a better understanding of which policy mix is most supportive for a transition towards a sustainable CE. New legislation might interact with existing laws in complementary or conflicting ways affecting business circularity potential. Experience with policy implementation has shown that novel policy initiatives require a profound understanding of the factors driving industrial firm dynamics. The analysis is therefore complemented with an intra-organizational perspective to understand the structures, processes, and practices companies need to adapt to enable a transition.

Through the findings of this project, policymakers can gain a better understanding of the barriers to a CE in the plastic packaging industry and learn about the existing and future environmental and economic hotspots in various value chains. Industry participants also benefit from this information, gaining a clearer picture about options in closing material loops in their respective industries and improving perception of their environmental and economic implementation potential.

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Mismanaged plastic waste is a major environmental concern especially in countries of the Global South. Funded by The Alliance to End Plastic Waste, this project was accomplished with the NGO ASASE from Ghana and their recycling plant Cash – it!.

This project explores to what extent waste management policies that have been proven to be successful in other geographies can help solve the challenge in developing countries. An in depth analysis of the variable and fixed costs of two of CASH-IT!’s products was performed to gain insights into the profitability of each. This was coupled with a sensitivity analysis to test the impacts of various performance areas such as labor, process efficiency, feedstock cost, processing quantity and process yield.

Another important segment of this project was to secure end-markets for CASH IT!`s outputs, which would include large plastic producers in Ghana, as well as smaller businesses set up by local entrepreneurs. The goal was to determine which end-applications are the most promising for the Ghanaian market and to identify an entrepreneur to set up and operate this business with the support of ASASE. The selected product from a market analysis and business case was tested for potential environmental and safety hazards. A systematic environmental and health assessment framework was developed that can be used to scan polymer-based products for potential red flags.
Following this, a detailed value chain analysis was performed to understand the true cost of collection, sorting and recycling. The collected data was used to foster discussion on the implementation of an EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility) for Ghana.

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The EU uses 4 million (and growing) tons of flexible food packaging. In 2018, the EU set a target of 55% recycling by 2025 - meaning a dramatically increased share of recycled content also for packaging, this would require significantly increased use of recycled content, estimated at almost 50% for PET and ~30% for PE, PP. To reach the 55% target, sorting capacity will need to increase by a factor of 2.6, recycling by almost a factor of five. The EU recycling targets are very ambitious for some member states, less so for others. Today, flexible packaging is generally less recycled than other packaging, in many countries recycling of flexibles is not yet taking place at all.

In this project, we supported the external page CEFLEX Consortium on their mission to close the loop of flexible packaging by 2025. CEFLEX is a collaborative initiative representing 160 members across the entire value chain of flexible packaging. Our aim was to design and advance better system solutions identified through the collaboration of companies representing the entire value chain. Furthermore we identified barriers for recycling to a level of detail where they can be resolved. Ultimately we created a success case for transforming an entire value chain and derived best practices as a much-needed blueprint for action. The goal is to establish a blueprint and transfer this knowledge to other value chains. Observations on the dynamics in the value chain, barriers, and contested issues are found in Download the project report. (PDF, 6.9 MB)

In a follow-up project, we worked with the consortium to gain a deeper understanding of these contested issues and to actively forge alignment between the consortium stakeholders to advance the circularity of the value chain.
We collaboratively identified the central topics essential for the circular transformation of the flexible value chain on which the stakeholders had diverging opinions. As a central element of our project, we worked with the consortium stakeholders to jointly formulate CEFLEX position statements on selected topics in order to forge alignment and guide collaboration in the transition. The statements were taken up by the consortium as their official position on these contested issues and were shared with all stakeholders and the public. Based on our experience from these intense negotiations, we summarized the key factors for successful collaboration along a value chain to transform it from linear to circular and developed a detailed blueprint with best practices on how to facilitate such collaboration to inform not only CEFLEX’s future work but also transfer this knowledge to other value chains.

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