Systemic Work for Deep Circularity

This contribution offers insights to the mission-based partnership TRACE (trace.dk) established 2022 for supporting circular economy (CE) of plastics and textiles in Denmark. It currently covers 20 projects of 180 million DKK with 120 partners across academia, the public sector, NGOs, and a broad range of industry partners. According to recent critique of EU policies and strategies by Bauwens et al (2020) politically installed initiatives for CE such as TRACE risks focusing mainly on ‘weak’ approaches, emphasizing technocratic solutions at the lower levels of the EU Waste Hierarchy (EU Commission, 2023). Moreover, with 221 and expanding definitions of CE (Kirchher et al, 2023), TRACE recognizes that transformation work spans much wider than single technologies, product- or material innovation and therefore must encompass a multitude of approaches across the value chain and in respect of the Waste Hierarchy for reaching deep transformation. Hence, for the past 2,5 years, TRACE has been striving to become an engine for systemic change, asking how the partnership activities might form coherence, harvest and accumulate results, stimulate circular maturity of partners and society, and frame an overall direction that secures actual circular transformation?<br/><br/>To mitigate this, TRACE is driven by mission-based research as offered by Mazzucato (2018a/b) together with approaches from collaborative design processes and network governance (Linden &amp; Aguiar, 2011; Cramer, 2020). This has been led by an abductive and open-minded investigation of ongoing insights and results for securing a synthetic sensemaking process (Kolko, 2011) that allows for a continuous and iterative hypothesizing, testing, reframing, and rethinking of possible pathways forward (Dorst, 2015; Engholm, 2023). For securing this, TRACE installed the “criteria 4” in all calls by 2023. This means that a crucial criterion for obtaining funding is to describe how the project contributes to already existing projects, and how project partners will dedicate time for synergy work. The assessment process this way includes securing that projects cover the entire matrix of the original TRACE roadmap that ties together three workstreams of plastics, common, and textiles, across the entire value chain (IM-CPT4, 2021). Furthermore, PI’s leading TRACE projects meet one day per semester for sharing insights and results in thematic workshops that are discussed with the purpose of learning together in an ongoing process how to build up capacity for circularity across projects and workstreams. <br/><br/>So far, these initiatives have informed awareness of possible new roles and partnerships for both researchers and industry partners (here also counting municipalities), as well as informed overall barriers and pathways for transition such as policy, lack of skills, logistics, facilities and knowledge infrastructure for CE to be built up within the partnership. Next steps will be to engage the wider partnership in ‘TRACE Academy’ events and round tables, and to expand activities beyond Denmark to the Nordics and the EU. The 2025 2nd roadmap amendment of TRACE to be presented at the conference will elaborate on these ideas and ambitions. <br/>