Short abstract

CircuMat project helps actors related to cities, city regions and industrial parks to investigate in a simple way how a closed-loop materials metabolism can be created at a local scale. This project also assesses the environmental and the economic benefits of local and regional circularity options.

Project description

EIT RawMaterials aims to boost competitiveness and the quality of life through new educational approaches and guided entrepreneurship. The main goals of the EIT RawMaterials include training the current and the future practitioners for the technical standards required by the raw materials industry today and fostering the innovation skills, knowledge and attitudes needed by entrepreneurs.

The CircuMat project will deliver results that can help practitioners for achieving the goals of EIT RawMaterials on a circular industry and circular cities. The deliverables of the project include a blended learning educational package, that can be used by practitioners to assess how to reach a closure of the regional and local metabolism and how to enhance regional and local resource efficiency.

The outcomes of this study will primarily be used by the practitioners and actors in industrial parks and local/regional governments. Using the outcomes of the projects, they will be able to analyse which primary resources are regionally used and which residual flows arise and which closing loops can be beneficial.

The Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) is one of the leading renowned institutes in the field of material flow analysis (MFA), life cycle assessment (LCA) and input output (IO) analysis. CML leads the development of the global Multi-Regional Environmentally Extended Supply and Use / Input Output database, EXIOBASE. Research projects at CML support sustainable decision making in policies and technologies regarding the production and the consumption.

• circular economy
• raw materials
• sustainability assessment