News for topic Resource-efficiency

UBC members Turku, Lahti, and Malmö are taking three times as many mitigation and adaptation measures as other cities to become climate neutral before 2050 and have received the highest award from CDP for their efforts.

Last year’s autumn came with good news, the project that UBC Sustainable Cities Commission is part of has been approved by the Interreg BSR, and we are glad to announce that the project BALTIPLAST dedicated to reducing single-use plastic waste was kicked off on 8-10 of February 2023 in Riga.

Four years ago, Kemi launched the Social Kitchen model for addressing food waste and providing social support. Let's take a look at the progress and inspiring results of the project!

Interreg Baltic Sea Region Conference gathered 300 participants to inspire each other with past project achievements and ambitions met by the opening opportunities.

The report of 2021 looks into another successful year of UBC-CDP cooperation, as we follow the paths of 21 UBC member cities to climate goals 2030.

City of Jyväskylä enhances resource wisdom and circular economy of everyday life with short and agile experiments. Get inspired by solutions coming directly from citizens, companies and associations!

While the EU’s policies over the years have led to significant progress in improving the environment, and in raising standards across the EU Member States, many environmental challenges still prevail. With more than 70% of the EU’s population currently living in urban areas, cities are critical to meeting the EU's environmental objectives and in helping the EU to become a more sustainable region.

Over 3 years of implementation, BSR WATER platform provided significant input into the regional policies. The variety of produced results can also be used by different regional stakeholders, including practitioners in the water sector.

The the moderator of the event was Per-Arne Nilsson from the city of Malmö, the co-chair of the UBC Sustainable Cities Commission. He introduced the topic of circular economies and explained how the UBC SCC addresses resource efficiency in its activities. The introduction was followed by presentations from 3 cities.

Following Lahti (Finland) - this year's European Green Capital - in 2023 is the City of Tallinn (Estonia). Tallinn was awarded the title earlier this month with the European Commission especially highlighting Tallinn's initiatives reflecting the ambitions of the European Green Deal.

In the previous project the focus was on city organization. All the branches were challenged to act in a more climate friendly way. Sorting and circulating of waste were improved, energy and water consumption was reduced, Social kitchen was established to reduce food waste and increase usage of vegetables. And so on. As a result, Kemi is now the second municipality in Finland having ISO 14001:2015 environmental certificate.

In 2020 we started with opening a hermetic composting plant, which is ready to process 40 000 tons of biowaste per year. This modern instalation (co-financed by EU) is permanently ventilated, and because of that, there is no unpleasant smell outside during the 5 weeks compost production process. Our next investment is to place on the city map 6 new selective waste collection points, and 2 of them are already being built.