Circularity meets creativity: How Turku is testing new ways to tackle everyday waste

Turku has committed to becoming climate neutral by 2029: one year ahead of the member cities of the European Union's Cities Mission, and 21 years ahead of the EU's own 2050 target. Since 1990, the city has already cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 63%, and circular economy principles are embedded across its sustainability strategies, roadmaps and targets. Yet, as in many European cities, some challenges – like household biowaste sorting, in Turku’s case – resist infrastructure and policy alone. Despite growing awareness and steadily improving collection systems, changing everyday habits has proven far harder than installing new bins.

Through the European project Creative Circular Cities (CCC), the municipality has spent the past three years building bridges between circularity, creativity, and community engagement. The project explores whether artists, designers and creative methods can help residents relate differently to waste, turning circularity from an obligation into something people actively want to be part of. 

In the EU, biowaste constitutes the largest share of municipal waste composition – 28.8%, and its separate collection poses a challenge to many municipalities. Looking to explore alternative approaches to this challenge, the local waste management company Lounais-Suomen Jätehuolto Oy (LSJH), in partnership with the CCC project, launched an open competition inviting artists, designers and citizens to propose creative approaches that would motivate people to sort their household biowaste. 34 ideas from across Finland were submitted, covering three main categories: illustrated or video concepts, physical solutions for the biowaste bucket itself and technical or gamified approaches.

The jury, formed of professionals from LSJH and the CCC project, selected two proposals to be further developed in the following months:

• BioBox (submitted by Kaisa Nurminen and her working group) – an artistic biowaste box designed for public spaces, allowing people to witness the compost process through the transparent walls.
• Biojätteen Oraakkeli (submitted by Anniina Pohjola) – a visual concept using creative cards to inspire discussions and support education processes around biowaste sorting, inviting people to explore alternative possibilities for managing waste. 

With a €3000 grant offered by HUMAK University of Applied Sciences, the main organizer of the competition, each winning team will continue working with LSJH to expand and finalize their concepts, and present them in October 2026, when LSJH can decide to move forward with either one or both of them. 

"What's exciting about this competition is seeing climate strategy actually take shape in people's hands," says Markus Suomi, Senior Lecturer at the Humak University of Applied Sciences. "We can write targets, we can build the systems, but it's a completely different thing when someone designs an idea that turns a real challenge into something we start addressing collectively in our day-to-day life. In the context of the biowaste competition, creative approaches give us a way to turn a strategic goal into something tangible and real, that people experience at home and in their daily environments." 

The competition is the latest milestone in the agenda that Turku has built through the CCC project. A 2025 Idea Incubator run by HUMAK brought artists, businesses and circular economy experts together to co-create ideas later tested at the ReTurku Circular Economy Carnival – a two-neighbourhood pilot led by Valonia, that drew over 1,000 participants across more than 30 events. The resulting concepts included a Zero Waste Experiment encouraging visitors to bring reusable cups and cutlery, a collaborative Sound Art Piece built from participants' reflections on the circular economy, and a Spoon Movement in which visitors traded a spoon for cake, the collected spoons later becoming a community art installation, the "spoon tree".

To help other organisations replicate the approach, HUMAK produced a free online microcourse covering the full incubator methodology and an interactive infographic summarising the key steps for designing a cross-sectoral idea incubator.

This type of cross-sector collaboration now continues through a recurring Co-creation Arena that gathers representatives from culture, circular economy, sustainability, citizen engagement and business every two to three months to exchange ideas and build a community of practice around circularity. On the digital side, two platforms that help connect citizens with urban circular economy services – Superhood Oy's "CircularCity" and INC Innovation Center's "ReMatch" – are being tested in Turku as part of CCC's Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) process. 

The city is also looking to carry the approach forward: a Citizen Engagement Card Game, developed by HUMAK from the Carnival's experience, was piloted with Kiel at the Urban Future – The Better Cities event in Ljubljana in March 2026, exploring ways to connect unused resources with community needs and turn circular economy ambitions into everyday practice though the involvement of citizens. The game could become a useful tool for other organizations, municipalities and communities that look to address local challenges in similar ways. 

Turku’s explorations are echoed across the other five municipalities involved in the Interreg – Baltic Sea Region project as well: Aarhus, Gdynia, Kiel, Riga, and Tallinn. Every city in the project is tackling the same question: how do you get circularity out of strategy documents and into people's daily routines? While there’s no singular answer that fits all contexts, each of these pilot initiatives can offer valuable insights and practices that others can build on.