Circular Glasgow

Circular Glasgow is hosted by Glasgow Chamber of Commerce and launched in November 2017, based on the outcomes of a comprehensive Glasgow City Circle scan.

Circular Glasgow was funded with support from the European Regional Development Fund through the £73 million Resource Efficiency Circular Economy Accelerator Programme.

Across the city, the project aimed to open new revenue streams, increase competitive advantage, and realise financial savings through developing circular economy approaches.

Circular Glasgow was named a finalist in the Circulars Awards 2019.

Circular Glasgow aims to build best practice and capacity on the circular economy generally across Glasgow businesses – helping them to identify opportunities for support and implement circular ideas. This is facilitated by:  

• Workshops and events - a series of knowledge sharing business to business networking events
• Circle Assessment – a tool that helps businesses understand opportunities to become more circular
• Circle Lab - an online hackathon event to find a circular solution to a local challenge. Circle Lab sought solutions to make Glasgow’s event industry more circular.  From over 200 contributions, the three winning ideas include a deposit-based reuse system for food and drink containers, circular designs for event marketing and branding, and a scheme that will repurpose organic waste into energy and fertilisers.  Ways to turn these ideas into pilot projects are now being explored.  

Circular Glasgow has been working directly with businesses to help them identify circular business opportunities using a "Circle Assessment".  This innovative online tool, created by Netherlands’ based experts, Circle Economy, looks at different ways businesses can innovate and incorporate new design thinking through the adoption of new business models, including circular economy strategies.  

Whether an organisation has already started to implement circular strategies or has just begun its transformation to become more circular, the online Circle Assessments create a simple way to diagnose how current practices match up to circular objectives, while identifying new business opportunities.  

As an example, a collaboration that was identified as part of a pre-project pilot, resulted in the first Scottish beer to be made from leftover bread, using Aulds’ unsold morning rolls to create Jaw Brew’s Hardtack beer. Aulds supplies its bread on a sale or return basis to retailers, and through the new partnership, surplus is now given to Jaw Brew, to ensure any waste is prevented.