IDEAS FOR GOOD will hold “Beyond Circularity2023 European Circular Economy Tour”

IDEAS FOR GOOD, Harch’s web media platform which gathers ideas for improving society, will hold a social good experience program “Beyond Circularity2023 European Circular Economy Tour of the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands.” The event will be held from June 8 to 15.

We want people to actually see and feel the tactile sustainability that cannot be conveyed through text alone. That is why IDEAS FOR GOOD, the world’s magazine of ideas for a better society, is planning “Experience for Good.”

This year’s trip will take place in Europe. The trip will take place from June 8, 2023, to June 15, 2023, in London, England, Paris, France, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where many unique examples of the circular economy, an economic and social concept that is currently attracting worldwide attention, will be gathered over a period of approximately eight days.

IDEAS FOR GOOD first conducted interviews for the European Circular Economy Special in November 2019, before the spread of the coronavirus. The editorial team visited Amsterdam, which was the first country in the world to announce a Circular Economy strategy, as well as London, Paris, and Berlin. In each country, we featured unique initiatives by private organizations as well as governments.

Since then, the situation in the world has changed more drastically than we could have imagined due to the new coronavirus and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We are faced with complex issues such as climate change, widening inequality, and the crisis of democracy, highlighting the limits of capitalism, which has destroyed the environment and created inequality and division for the sake of economic growth.

In Europe, which was quick to adopt the circular economy, the concept of “doughnut economics” or “de-growth,” which aims to achieve social justice for all people within the limited resources of the Earth, is increasingly attracting attention in order to address the limitations of capitalism and the depletion of resources. Is it possible to grow an economy indefinitely? Is it necessary to keep growing in the first place? Is economic growth really leading us to happiness?

What kind of dilemmas do European countries that have been working on the implementation of the circular economy face in the midst of the crisis, and how are they struggling to move forward? Through this tour, we will meet people who are working on the circular economy from various perspectives and rethink what we have now. In the process, we hope participants will discover the connections between humans and nature, between others, between the past and the present, and various other connections.

We will visit more than 20 organizations related to the circular economy during our trip to the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands. The IDEAS FOR GOOD editorial staff, who are regularly exposed to social good examples from around the world, have carefully selected these organizations. This tour of IDEAS FOR GOOD introduces some of the places we visited and the themes of each country.

*We plan to add new destinations as needed.

[Reference] Beyond Circularity2023 European Circular Economy Tour of the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands | IDEAS FOR GOOD (in Japanese)
[Related Site] IDEAS FOR GOOD (in Japanese)