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.