CircleVET – Exploring the Educational Potential of Circular Economy Erasmus Project

Project Title

CircleVET – Exploring the Educational Potential of Circular Economy

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and training

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education; Environment and climate change; Social entrepreneurship / social innovation

Project Summary

Circle VET Project
Circular Economy – we all care about it, collectively and individually, but somehow, we have so far remained apart. This is one of the main lessons we have learned during the CircleVET project. While countries like Finland are ahead in integrating circular economy in their vocational education (VET), others, like Germany, are catching up and still others, such as Turkey, seem to be lagging behind. However, all over Europe, new ideas are emerging on how to integrate the circular economy into vocational education. Their practical implementation is a European topic, and this is precisely what CircleVET has focused on.
All participants of the project have become more aware of the need to use circular economy skills in their work. They are ready to share their newly gained knowledge, to teach and encourage others to understand the ongoing transition towards circular economy and its potential. The trained facilitators have acquired new tools for training and teaching circular economy in VET. The partners went through different processes, learnt a lot from each other and improved the knowledge and skills of their staff.

E-book
The compendium was produced as a result of the Circle VET project. It is a comprehensive compendium of hands-on methods used across Europe. This manual provides easy-to-apply innovative tools and methods designed to motivate learners to stay involved and update their skills for the ongoing transition from a linear to a circular economy.
Evaluation of good practises
CircleVET has developed an assessment grid for practices based on the following four principles:
• interdisciplinary approaches;
• real-life relevance and applicability;
• critical Thinking (rethinking) of the current status;
• flexibility and versatility.
After identifying and evaluating smart practices in teaching and applying circular economy principles, we came to the conclusion that our foremost task should be to focus on determining methods that provide an introduction into and a general overview of the possibilities to teach the basics of circular economy.
At the same time, our visits to various organisations and businesses have demonstrated that good practices exist in all partner countries, even though they are often not yet being identified and labelled as “circular”. During several transnational meetings, we have presented more than 70 smart practices, not only from Finland, Germany, Italy, Slovakia, Spain and Turkey but also from Belgium, France, and the Netherlands.
During the second meeting in Madrid, we established an assessment grid – a tool which was very helpful for selecting practices that are among the smartest. Those presented in this e-book are in our opinion the most interesting, representative, useful and transferable ones.

3 online labs
All practices, methods and experiences collected were tested and reviewed in three thematic training labs:
Testing circular methods for co-working and innovation hubs: general and business oriented methods
Testing circular methods in Fashion
Testing circular methods in Recycling
The design of the training labs was based on David Kolb’s experiential learning theory, represented by a four-stage cycle: concrete experience, reflective observation of the new experience, abstract reflection, and active experimentation.
The three labs consisted of practical activities during which a diverse group of peers shared their experience and explored potential solutions with the aim of co-discovery, that is exploration in a collaborative setting.

Not offline but online…
Initially, we had planned to meet physically for these labs, but the onset of the Covid19 pandemic and the restrictions on travelling and meeting during the last part of the project made this impossible. Thanks to the German National Agency we were able to move the labs online.

Policy recommendation
The detailed discussion of the selected practices has allowed us to work out recommendations on where and how to use them. Based on the lessons learned while testing these methods in our labs, we have decided to target the recommendations at practitioners and decision-makers.
On the local level, our project has resulted in an increasing awareness of the importance of the circular economy and of the potential of using local dissemination circuits, especially in the fashion and recycling sectors.

We wanted to contribute to European discourses on teaching and learning skills required for a future circular economy. All project results are intended to help designing curricula for schools and providers of adult, youth and vocational education providers by offering ways to promote further education, mobilisation, and greater social innovation in this field.
Our ultimate goal is to contribute to finding new, innovative means that allow us to move away from a culture of “produce to discard”, as outlined by the European Commission, and work toward the European Union’s Circular Economy Action Plan.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 133024,66 Eur

Project Coordinator

COMPARATIVE RESEARCH NETWORK EV & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Future Fashion Forward e.V.
• Narodna recyklacna agentura Slovensko
• Suomen ympäristöopisto SYKLI oy
• SOMOS MÁS
• CRCLR GmbH
• GODESK S.R.L.
• Izmir Tuhafiye Manifatura ve Benzerleri Esnaf Odasi