CATALY(C)ST

The world needs new ways to transition towards a Sustainable and Circular Economy (CE) to achieve UN’s 2030 agenda for Sustainable Development and climate neutrality by 2050. It requires going beyond the classics and paving bold, collaborative, efficient and innovative ways of change.

The CATALY(C)ST-project: Youth Change Makers as Catalysts for a transition to a Sustainable Circular Economy, mixes new ways of making and developing in community led peer-to-peer co-creation closely integrated with classic applied research approaches. Bringing best practice from the research world, the maker communities, the youth movements and industry into one strong initiative. This will allow unusual partners to join in on ONE UNIFORM agenda to speed up development of Nordic sustainable CE impact projects.

The initiative will apply the collective experience, competencies, research, company & talent network from excellent research and entrepreneurship institutions; Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

The CATALY(C)ST-project brings together four main elements:

1) Accelerating Nordic companies' transition to a sustainable circular economy by engaging students, manufacturing companies to speed up their CE transition by a collaborative approach for CE development projects by activating resources from; a talent-mass of students, world-class researchers and mentor experts, Nordic innovation hubs and organizations.

2) Impactful minds of tomorrow for circular economy champions and innovations: Competency and experience building of the youth and the industry champions within existing companies to become change makers.

3) Mobilizing a Nordic change community for CE: Alignment within already existing communities to establish a new Nordic youth community. 4) Industry& research - partnership-based program: Bringing expert knowledge to companies’ CE-development projects.

The main aim is to maximize value by increasing resource productivity, enhancing energy efficiency, lowering resource consumption and decreasing waste. Overall mantra; decoupling value creation from resource consumption. Bringing results from the CIRCit research project to the next level by including the findings from: 1) CE readiness & opportunity mapping, 2) CE Business models creation & servitization, 3) CE products by Eco-design, 4) CE enhancement by digitalization 5) CE close the loop strategies.