Biowaste Clubs Across Europe Bring Stakeholders Together to Upcycle Urban Biowaste

As part of our HOOP project, eight lighthouse cities and regions are blazing the trail in Europe by creating Biowaste Clubs that seek to create high value-added products from urban biowaste.

Tackling the challenges created by urban biowaste is a monumental task – and not one that can be solved by municipalities alone. Facilitated and supported by the CSCP and other partners from the HOOP project, the eight cities and regions have established Biowaste Clubs as an engagement tool to bring together different local actors and discuss new ways to transform urban food waste and sewage into high value-added products.

The focus of the first round of the Biowaste Club meetings varied from lighthouse to lighthouse. In Kuopio (Finland), one of the issues raised was the space limitation in private households for a separate biowaste bin. In Greater Porto (Portugal), three municipalities presented their experience with household separate collection. In Bergen (Norway), the focus was on some innovative valorisation streams such as insect rearing or algae production as feed for aquaculture. Building on their experience within the predecessor project SCALIBUR, the city of Albano Laziale (Italy) and the region of Western Macedonia (Greece) installed sensors to optimise biowaste collection and are looking into fermentation of coffee grounds respectively. Münster (Germany) discussed the challenges and opportunities to improve the collection quality and quantities and also ways to engage citizens better within the city. Almere’s (Netherlands) initial Biowaste Club meeting focused on using biowaste as building material in the construction sector, while Murcia (Spain) looked at the topic of circular bioeconomy opportunities.

Although the actors involved, the challenges to be addressed and the ideas being discussed differ between the lighthouses, the importance of multi-stakeholder approaches to develop a shared vision and agenda for a local bio-economy and to collaboratively implement it was confirmed throughout all Clubs. One of the aims of the Biowaste Clubs is to build active and productive networks as well as strengthen cooperation within existing ones in order to identify new business opportunities that support the urban circular economy.

HOOP is a Horizon 2020 project.

For further questions, please contact Carina Diedrich.