Within European cities, entrepreneurs engage in private and public collaborative initiatives that work towards reducing local solid waste streams (Futurium, 2019). Furniture and interior design products account for nearly 50% of these waste streams, making them a key priority on the EU agenda to prevent climate change (Vanacore et al, 2021). New legislation to extend producer responsibility and reduce waste incineration is developing on a national level (PBL, 2021) and collaborative initiatives for urban upcycling are emerging (Ministerie I&W, 2023; Futurium, 2019). Business models to support upcycling are evolving, but their configuration and effectiveness is little understood.
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With growing environmental concerns, upcycling has become an important theme in literature and practice. Upcycling can help slow and close resource cycles through product life-extension. Cities offer opportunities for upcycling initiatives and seek to tackle challenges in urban solid waste management by encouraging entrepreneurs to create value from local waste streams in urban resource centres and circular crafts centres. However, little is known about what drives urban upcycling and which barriers and drivers occur. This study explores urban upcycling in the context of the Dutch furniture industry, since The Netherlands positions itself as a ‘circular economy hotspot’ and furniture offers promising opportunities and best practices for upcycling. The analysis of 29 semi-structured interviews with experts engaged in urban upcycling reveals personal motives, drivers and barriers. Personal motives include (1) a personal purpose to ‘do good’, (2) an urge to challenge the status quo and (3) learning and inspiring by doing. Key drivers entail opportunities to (1) engage in collaborative experimentation, (2) participate in cross-sectoral local networks, (3) develop resource-based adaptive competences, (4) respond to increasing demand for upcycled products and (5) make social business activities financially viable. Key barriers perceived by upcycling experts include (1) limitations in resource availability, (2) increasing capacity requirements, (3) negative public quality perception, (4) limited marketing competences and (5) an unequal playing field. This study contributes with a comprehensive definition of urban upcycling and a structured overview of key factors that drive and constrain urban upcycling.
DOCUMENT
Our current take-make-dispose economic model faces a vital challenge as it extracts resources from the natural environment at faster rates than that the natural environment can replenish. A circular economy where businesses lower their negative impact on the natural environment by transitioning towards recycling business models (RBMs), one of the four principles of circularity, is suggested as a promising solution. For a RBM to become viable, collaboration among several stakeholders and across several industries is required. In addition, the RBM should be scalable to make a positive impact. Hence, developing RBMs is complex as organizations need to consider multiple principles imposed by the recycling, collaborative, and scalability dimensions of these business models (BMs). In addition, these principles often remain general and not actionable to the practitioners. Therefore, in this study, we researched the practical guidelines for viable RBMs that are also collaborative and scalable. The empirical setting is the reuse of textile fibers to develop biocomposite products. We studied three cases using a research-through-design approach. We contribute to the literature on RBMs by showing the six minimum practical guidelines for recyclability, collaboration, and scalability. We draw implications for within sector collaborations and advance the thought that lease constructs challenge the scalability of RBM.
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