Events

The CirCus project was launched on 8 September 2023 with a seminar bringing together academic scholars as well as practitioners both directly involved and interested in the project. The first open session discussed the wider context of the CirCus project, with subsequent sessions centred around the focus areas of CirCus: building commodities, buildings and construction, and public contracts for buildings, construction and building commodities. For each of these sessions, short presentations by a number of experts were followed by group discussions.

The programme for the launching seminar is available here.

On Thursday 30 November 2023, the CirCus project hosted the closed workshop on ‘Circular Economy and Contract Law’ at the University of Copenhagen. To facilitate circular economy transitions, a systemic shift is needed requiring support from all public and private areas of law, including contract law. Contract law can, for example, help underpin leasing, sharing, and other circular business models, as well as operationalise different tools such as extended producer responsibility and producer liability.

The ‘Circular Economy and Contract Law’ workshop brings together researchers from a variety of research institutions, including from the Universities of Bristol, Cardiff, Exeter, Lund and Nottingham, to discuss in detail how certain areas of contract law can support circular economy implementations. The morning of the workshop focused on constructing circular contracts generally, whereas the afternoon sessions examined the construction sector. The latter was informed by legal practitioner insights on the main challenges of implementing and enforcing circularity demands in construction contracts.

The programme for the workshop is available here.

As part of the project “Recycling means never having to say you’re sorry” establishing ongoing collaborative research between the Universities of Edinburgh and Copenhagen on the regulatory transition to a circular economy, a workshop has been organised at the University of Edinburgh at the end of January 2024. This workshop will explore questions including:

• How do circular economy policy proposals differ from existing regulatory frameworks on the protection of the environment?
• Do the (proposed) circular economy approaches change the emphasis or, more importantly, effect a substantive transformation of legal tools and techniques?

The workshop is a closed workshop bringing together researchers from the Universities of Copenhagen, Edinburgh, and Surrey, and Chatham House.

This workshop is funded by the Edinburgh-Copenhagen Strategic Partnership Seed Fund awarded to Dr Michael Picard at Edinburgh Law School, The University of Edinburgh, and Dr Katrien Steenmans, CEPRI. Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen.

The draft programme for the workshop is available here.

Transitioning towards a more circular economy is an important tool for achieving sustainability goals. It is high on the agenda in the EU where a new, overarching regulatory framework has just been introduced, the Ecodesign for Sustainable Product Regulation 2024/1781, which entered into force on 18 July 2024. The aim of the regulation is to set new ecodesign requirements for products in order to improve durability, reusability, upgradability and reparability and to make products more energy efficient. As concrete measures, the regulation also introduces the concept of ‘the digital passport’ which will contain product information for buyers and users, and a ban on the destruction of unused textiles and footwear. Similar rules are found in newly introduced sector specific regulatory frameworks, such as the Battery Regulation 2023/1542. The goal is to make the new requirements applicable to all products that are put on the market in the EU. This means that the regulatory frameworks will have implications also for companies outside of the EU, which export products into the EU, either directly or via supply chains.

Whereas the new regulatory initiatives can be seen as primarily public law instruments, they will have consequences also in private law.

The workshop focused on this aspect. It covered the following themes: How will the regulatory frameworks on circular design effect contracting in the supply chain? Can transparency of product information be reconciled with the idea of the ‘bargain’? How to make conformity assessments of multipurpose products? What does ‘a right to repair’ entail and does it conflict with IP principles? Will the ban on the destruction of certain products have liability implications? In which ways will the regulatory frameworks have extraterritorial effects on companies in the supply chain outside of the EU?

The workshop was organised by Prof Vibe Ulfbeck while an EUI Visiting Professor at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.

The programme for the workshop is available here.

Hyperlink attachment: see email – it’s the document titled ‘CirCus workshop program 2024’