CircuLaw, an online legal knowledge platform, was officially launched today! The platform provides policymakers and civil servants with detailed guidance on which legal instruments are available to promote circularity and how to implement them.
Accelerating the Circular Transition
The need for a transition to a more sustainable, circular economy is becoming increasingly urgent as the world faces the escalating climate breakdown and resource scarcity. The European Union's Circular Economy Action Plan and the Dutch government's commitment to reduce the use of primary raw materials by 50% by 2030 reflect the growing commitment to this transition, while this year's Circularity Gap Report and Dutch Circular Economy Monitor show no progress in this regard.
CircuLaw aims to help achieve these goals and accelerate the circular transition by making opportunities within existing law and regulation more accessible. Currently, law and regulation are often seen as obstacles to change, resulting in many policy opportunities being overlooked. CircuLaw is changing this perception by making the law more accessible and actionable for policymakers.
“Our economy can only become circular when the system settings are right. Laws and regulations play a crucial role in this, on all authority levels. With CircuLaw, we help policy makers and public project leads with setting the right rules, so that a level playing field for circular entrepreneurs emerges. We call it Law as a Service.”
Arjan Hassing
CircuLaw Project Lead
Bringing the Law to Life
At the heart of the CircuLaw project is the circulaw.nl tool, a free and open-source website that provides policymakers and civil servants with detailed guidance on how to implement specific legal instruments. The instruments, organized into practical categories, have been selected by a team of legal experts from various universities as the most promising opportunities available within Dutch law.
The CircuLaw team is also researching other methods of sharing eco-legal knowledge and promoting collaboration within and between relevant communities. The issues addressed by CircuLaw are global in nature, and international opportunities are being explored to maximize impact and make law and regulation true agents of circular change. The aim is to make CircuLaw the primary source of reference for circular policymaking in the Netherlands in the near future.
Interested to learn more about Circulaw? Click here!
Circulaw partners: City of Amsterdam, Dark Matter Labs, Built by Nature, Circulaire Bouweconomie, EIT Climate-KIC, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Ministery of Finance, Provence of Flevoland, Provence of North Holland, Netherlands Enterprise Agency, Delft University of Technology, University of Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Wageningen University and Research, AMS Institute
