Presentation to the First OECD Roundtable on the Circular Economy in Cities and Regions. Paul Ekins and Teresa Domenech

1. Circular Economy in Cities and Regions
Presentation to the First OECD Roundtable on the
Circular Economy in Cities and Regions
Paul Ekins and Teresa Domenech
Professor of Resources and Environmental Policy
Lecturer in Circular Economy
University College London
OECD, Paris July 4th 2019

2. Why Cities Matter
• Global urbanisation trends (major displacement from
rural areas to cities)
– 50% of people in the planet lives in cities
• Population growth is going to concentrate in cities
– Expected to raise to 70% by 2050
• Produce 80% of global GDP
– Major hubs of innovation and creativity
• Major consumers of raw materials and energy
– Consume 75% of natural resources
– Produce 60-80% of GHG emissions
– Produce 50% of waste
• High infrastructural demand for cities up to 2050
• Highly dependent on the hinterland/rural areas

3. The role of cities in the CE
• Cities as consumption hubs
– Most of the global resources are being consumed in cities
– This includes resources from the biological and technical cycle
– Consumption is largely linear
• Scale of cities
– The scale of consumption of resources in cities have grown
significantly, in both developed and developing countries
• Cities as reservoirs of resources
– Accumulation of stocks in cities mean that they could act as
reservoirs of resources in the future (technical feasibility of
urban mining not demonstrated at scale)

4. The importance of cities for the CE transition
Source: own elaboration based on data from World Bank (2019); Kaza et al. (2018); UN-Habitat (2013) and own estimations

5. Cities vs rural life
• Once traditional lifestyles are changed by
modern lifestyles, smart design of cities may:
– Decrease use of resources (i.e. infrastructures)
– Decrease need for travelling
– Offer opportunities for cycling of materials and
cascading of water, heat and energy
Cities hold the key for a sustainable future

6. Circular Cities
• How to define circularity for cities?
• What does circularity mean in the urban
context?
• Urban metabolism:
– Inputs to the city are transformed and consumed
– Outputs and unwanted outputs (wastes) are
produced by the city
– How to decrease the metabolic rate of cities?

7. From linear to circular urban metabolism
Source: World Future Council, 2010

8. Challenges and opportunities for cities
in the CE
• Specialization of uses in cities have tended to concentrate
activities related with final consumption (residential uses) and
service activities
• Lack of productive activities mean that opportunities to close
the loop of cities, through recycling of resources back into the
productive cycle, are limited and tend to engage movement of
resources at wider scales
• City scale works well for tighter loops of reuse and repair, due to
proximity between consumers and scale
• Differences between biological and technical cycles

9. The Biological Cycle in Cities
Source: own elaboration

12. Key challenges
• Closing the loop is difficult and needs to consider energy requirements
associated with some regenerative activities
• Dissociation between production centre and consumption centres means
that some of the waste resources produced by cities would be unlikely to re-
enter the metabolism of cities as input (with exception of energy recovery),
but this goes against keeping integrity of the materials
• Logistics of reclaiming materials in global supply chains possible but complex
and requires strict regulation, environmentally sound treatment/recycling,
and improved data flows (new amendments to increase traceability of plastic
global flows as part of Basel Convention a step in the right direction but what
about other materials?)
• Dematerialisation? Hidden resources of dematerialisation (delocalisation of
waste). Issue of scale of the system (growth of the techno-sphere) is rarely
addressed
• Infrastructural lock-ins and diversity of stakeholders

13. Thank you
p.ekins@ucl.ac.uk
www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/sustainable