Circular Ports - Deploying circular economy in port environments

Project period

1.1.2025 - 29.2.2028

Project funding

Interreg Baltic Sea Region 2021-2027

In the project Circular Ports, Baltic Sea ports explore symbiosis opportunities within port environments for waste reduction and material reuse, establishing viable circular business models.

Finnish Pilot: Mustola Port, Lappeenranta

LAB University of Applied Sciences is working in the Mustola port in the city of Lappeenranta with the goal of understanding all material flows entering and leaving the port.

LAB is developing an easy-to-use online material platform designed for both companies and the port authority. The aim is to increase transparency, support circular economy solutions, and facilitate collaboration among various stakeholders within the port environment.

More information about the project

The EU Green Deal launched a strategy for a climate-neutral, resource-efficient & competitive economy, in which strengthening Circular Economy (CE) is a main building block, to fight climate change. Anyhow, port environments (port city administrations, port authorities, enterprises) neither have the overview about waste-/material flows & supply chains nor instruments to find economic feasible CE-synergies today. Reasons are a scattered stakeholder environment and unclear responsibilities. This hinders to develop CE best practices in port environments, to be scaled-up in the BSR too.

Circular Ports lifts CE synergies & provides transferable solutions to deploy CE in BSR port environments, presented in a toolbox that contains:

- A methodology for data collection,

-mining, & -visualisation on waste-/material flows in port environments to provide a basis for CE strategy implementation.

- Functional stakeholder platforms to find symbioses between enterprises.

- Business models based on CE-strategies to motivate replicators to scale-up solutions.

- Procurement guidelines considering CE.

Applying the CE principle benefits in an increased GDP by +0.5% & +700,000 new jobs by 2030 in the EU, less emissions & by that fights climate change. Further, there is a clear business case for enterprises: since manufactures in the EU spend 40% on materials, closed loop models can increase their profitability, while sheltering them from resource price fluctuations & providing better resilience.