As the European Commission moves toward its long-awaited Circular Economy Act later this year, the Polish port city of Gdynia raises a question increasingly hard to avoid: can a local pilot initiative turn into infrastructure an entire region can share? Since November 2023, this question has been explored within Creative Circular Cities (CCC), a €3.98 million project co-funded through the EU's Interreg Baltic Sea Region Programme.
Over the past three years, the Baltic Sea Region fostered collaborations between six municipalities involved in the European project Creative Circular Cities: Gdynia (PL), Aarhus (DK), Kiel (DE), Riga (LV), Tallinn (EE), and Turku (FI). The purpose was to explore how creative industries, communities and local authorities can rethink the way in which cities relate to the resources they already have. From restoration workshops to intensive courses for students and businesses, the project provided frameworks for experimentation and knowledge sharing towards a more sustainable, circular economy in the cities and in the region. In Gdynia, this work focused on the EU's least-documented waste streams: bulky waste.
Eurostat folds bulky waste into a broad "other" category of municipal waste, together with textiles, batteries and electronic equipment, a group that accounts for roughly 34 million tonnes, or about 14.5% of all EU municipal waste, with no further public breakdown by individual stream. Several member states do not even run a full compositional analysis on this residual waste, meaning flows like bulky items are not consistently separated out in national reporting.
In Gdynia, Pomeranian Science and Technology Park PPNT Gdynia and the “Pomorskie in the European Union” Association set out to address this gap directly. The project partners started mapping who in the city generates bulky waste and who could reuse it, while developing working relationships between residents, designers and local businesses who would be able to give discarded items a second life. The result, a prototype of the circular bulky waste management service "Podaj dalej - Share it", takes inspiration from Aarhus's UPCYCL scheme, which matches industrial excess materials with companies that can put them to use. After testing the prototype locally, the next step for the project’s team is to develop a dedicated guidance webpage for other municipalities, making it easier for cities that look to replicate the approach and develop their own platform for bulky-waste circulation.
"Bulky waste is probably one of the clearest opportunities cities have to practise circularity without waiting for new infrastructure. Our goal was never simply to divert more items from disposal — it was to understand how designers, businesses, residents, and public and cultural institutions could work together to keep these materials in circulation, adapt them, and repurpose them in creative ways," says PPNT Gdynia Design Centre representative Urszula Kasińska.
"What Gdynia has been testing locally is part of a much larger question the region is asking. Through Creative Circular Cities, we are seeing how a single municipality's pilot, when documented and shared, can become something other cities adapt rather than reinvent. That is the kind of regional cooperation and transfer of learnings this project was built to support, with an eye toward what scalability could look like at EU level," says Rafał Rolka, Project Coordinator at "Pomorskie in the European Union" Association.
This is the conversation the project's Transition Lab was built for. Held in Gdynia this spring, the gathering brought together partners from across the Baltic Sea Region for a session dedicated specifically to replication and scalability, questioning whether pilot work built in one city can be taken apart and rebuilt in another. With circular economy regulation, resource security and cross-border cooperation all converging on the EU's policy agenda this year, the conversation reflects a wider recognition: city-level experiments and continent-level policy are no longer separate tracks.
Yet whether Gdynia's local practices can travel beyond the city's limits remains an open question. While a pilot can prove an idea works, turning it into lasting practice depends on policy that goes beyond the project itself: local commitments that keep partnerships active once funding cycles end, and international frameworks that help cities build on each other's experiments rather than start from zero each time. Gdynia's bulky-waste work is a useful case precisely because it makes both sides of that challenge visible: what a simple, well-supported pilot can achieve, and how much policy infrastructure still needs to be built around it before this kind of work becomes the rule rather than the exception.
Behind these local efforts lies a bigger question: what finance model can circular initiatives actually rely on, once EU project funding runs out? Circularity transition cannot be fully sustained and encouraged as long as linear options remain the cheaper choice. And will there be investment in the people skills the circular economy depends on? These are just some of the questions city actors would be eager to see answered in the Circular Economy Act.
Creative Circular Cities (CCC) is a transnational project co-funded by the Interreg Baltic Sea Region Programme and the European Union. The project explores how culture and the creative industries can help cities move from linear consumption to circular lifestyles. Across six Baltic Sea Region cities, Gdynia, Aarhus, Kiel, Riga, Tallinn and Turku, CCC develops and tests tools, models and local activities that connect circular economy with creativity, citizen engagement, business development and policymaking.
In Poland, CCC is implemented with local partners including PPNT Gdynia Design Centre and the “Pomorskie in the European Union” Association.
