News for topic Resource-efficiency

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.

In the second EUCF round an even larger number of cities and municipalities will be selected to benefit from tailor-made support and access the grant of €60,000 to develop an investment concept - an initial step towards a fully-fledged business and financial plan. The call for applications will be open from 29 March to 31 May.

Valmiera – the evergreen city

The goal of the ‘6Aika: ILPO – Climate Positive Business Parks and Value Chains’ project is to help companies find new, lower-emission and carbon-binding solutions and co-operation models. One of the ways to achieve these goals is charting a climate path. The aim is to identify the emission sources and carbon sinks of the business hub, as well as means of reducing emissions.

Last year we had a work group consisting of people from different organizations discussing could we do something in order to reduce food waste. As a result, City of Kemi hired a vegetarian food expert with whom we found out that even though local groceries donate waste food to charity there still remain lots of mainly fruit, vegetables and vegetarian food that is not suitable for charity. The reasons are that that kind of food gets rapidly spoiled when handled several times.