CircularInvest will provide project development assistance (PDA) to selected circular economy project promoters from across Europe with the aim to develop significant projects at the local and regional scales, and close investments for an overall volume of more than €20 million.

During the project’s lifetime, CircularInvest will launch two calls for expressions of interest to engage circular economy project promoters. The services offered include project development assistance, knowledge transfer and networking opportunities.

The lessons learnt from CircularInvest’s experience will prepare the pathway for future replication through a Step-by-Step Guide to de-risk future circular economy projects; policy recommendations; a Circular Investor guide to increase investors’ trust; a knowledge exchange platform for project promoters; business cases to allow the replication of circular economy solutions; and a pipeline of circular economy investment opportunities to support initiatives after the project’s end.

CHORIZO aims to improve the understanding of how social norms influence behaviour and food loss waste generation and use this knowledge to improve the effectiveness of decision-making and engagement of food chain actors, towards zero food waste.

The project´s particular goals are to address existing research gaps and will use its outcomes to deliver and advance innovations helping actors to engage more effectively in food waste prevention and reduction activities

The website is the first port of call for all things related to public procurement of innovation (PPI) and pre-commercial procurement (PCP). It aims to make public procurement of innovation a wide-spread reality in Europe.

The main idea behind the GPP Helpdesk is to promote and disseminate information about GPP, and to provide timely and accurate answers to stakeholders' enquiries. Stakeholders can send their questions by email to gpp-helpdesk@iclei.org

Part of the GPP Helpdesk service are the publication of monthly newsletters - GPP News-Alerts. Each News-Alert provides short articles, forthcoming GPP events, new website updates, an interview with a key stakeholder, and summaries of GPP examples. All editions are available here http://ec.europa.eu/environment/gpp/alert_en.htm

The Global Environment Facility (GEF) is supporting a SAICM project on global best practices for emerging chemical policy issues of concern. The project overarchingly aims to achieve the sound management of chemicals throughout their lifecycle by 2020 and sound management of chemicals and waste beyond 2020.
UNEP and ICLEI Europe are working jointly on supporting implementation of component 2 of the project, and in particular the activities in the electronics sector. These activities aim to help governments and value chain actors in the electronics sector track and manage chemicals of concern (CoC) in their products. This work is focussed on developing global sustainable public procurement guidance enabling purchasers to ultimately reduce the use of chemicals of concern (CoC) in the electronics sector and supporting the training for adaptation of global tools and guidance to the local context of public purchasers in Colombia.

The BIOMODEL4REGIONS project aims to support the establishment of the innovative governance models at local/regional level to achieve better-informed decision-making processes, social engagement and innovation to support and strengthen EU and international science-policy interfaces to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.

The methodology is based on the set-up of a governance structure among bioeconomy clusters that will leverage on previous successful projects, initiatives and best practices to capitalise on work performed through several years of research and studies in the field of bioeconomy. These results will be demonstrated within the project to support 6 pilot regions chosen in clusters’ network.

The OECD is launching a new project to support selected cities/regions in using public procurement as a strategic tool to achieve their policy objectives and priorities. The project will be implemented with the support of ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability. It is open to ICLEI members, Global Lead City Network on Sustainable Procurement and Procura+ Participants as well as other cities ICLEI works with on this topic. The project comes at a time when public procurement is playing an increasingly critical role in delivering the goods and services that are necessary to fight the Covid-19 pandemic and prepare for post-crisis recovery.

In addition to providing support to selected cities and regions, the project offers the opportunity to produce comparative data and statistics on public procurement in cities and regions, facilitate peer-to-peer learning, and assess the procurement performance at the local level.

For more information on how your city/region can join the project, please contact Mark Hidson, Global Director, ICLEI’s Sustainable Procurement Centre (procurement@iclei.org) and Soo-Jin Kim, Head of Urban Policies and Reviews Unit, OECD (Soo-Jin.KIM@oecd.org).

Based on the findings from the IMAILE project, which conducted a pre-commercial procurement of Personal Learning Environment software, the LEA project aims to develop a critical mass of European procurers demanding innovative learn tech solutions.

CityLoops is a four-year EU-funded project focused on two waste streams: organic, and construction and demolition waste, including soil. Høje-Taastrup and Roskilde (Denmark), Mikkeli (Finland), Apeldoorn (the Netherlands), Bodø (Norway), Porto (Portugal) and Seville (Spain) are the seven European cities involved in the project that will develop and test a series of demonstration actions on construction and demolition waste (CDW) and organic waste (OW) with the aim of achieving material circularity. Over 30 new tools and processes will be tested as part of CityLoops.