Welcome to BlueCity in Rotterdam, where a collective of 30 small businesses is putting the zero-waste ‘circular economy’ to the test

In an office made from a jigsaw puzzle of reclaimed windows, a single-use fork is being fed into a transparent cube. A hand crank is turned on the side of the cube and the fork is being shredded, ready to be melted down into a filament that can be 3D-printed into a brand new product, in this case a ring with a heart.

“Plastic is a wonderful material,” muses Casper van der Meer. “Our message isn’t that we’re against plastics, we just have to use it better and to recycle it.”

Van der Meer is the co-founder of Better Future Factory, one of 30 businesses set up in a vast derelict swimming pool complex on the banks of the river Maas in Rotterdam. Besides designers and engineers, there are bio-scientists, growers, caterers, brewers, architects, carpenters, storytellers. Oh, and hundreds of worms. The idea is to create one ecosystem that shares resources and reuses waste in a trial “circular economy”. They call it BlueCity.

Worms compost all the organic waste in BlueCity … mangoes are mashed into leather, plastic is 3D-printed into new products

With environmental threats multiplying almost as fast as the waste in landfill, “circular economy” has emerged as a buzzword – the promise of a system that circulates products for as long as possible and promotes a more sustainable use of raw materials.

The world generates 2bn tonnes of solid waste annually – enough to fill 250m builder’s skips. If these were placed end to end, they would go around the world more than 23 times.

In the UK, 12m tonnes of municipal waste went to landfill in 2016, of which half was biodegradable. Globally, tens of millions of tonnes of plastic are discarded every year – but less than 10% is recycled.

A 2050 circular strategy has been in place in the Netherlands since 2016, with a nationwide objective to halve primary raw material usage by 2030. Rotterdam is trying to position itself as a leader in the circular economy movement. As an emissions hotspot and a significant consumer of raw materials (because of the port of Rotterdam) it has an urgent need to deliver on the rhetoric.

In March this year the municipality of Rotterdam announced a four-year pilot, pointing to innovations such as BlueCity as crucial to the programme. “Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) account for a large proportion of the city’s economy and employment,” explains Marijke Visser from Rotterdam Circular, a government initiative. “This makes them important for changes in business behaviour and processes, but also for behavioural change.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A workshop in the BlueCity lab. Photograph: Sophie de Vos

BlueCity is an impressive asset to point to, not just because of the startups but because of the building itself. Thirty years ago it was a Center Parcs resort, a giant glasshouse called Tropicana with flumes and jacuzzis, saunas and spas, shops and restaurants.

By 2012 it had fallen into disuse – but to Siemen Cox, the hulking superstructure looked like a giant greenhouse. Cox was looking for a site for his innovative enterprise growing mushrooms from coffee grounds. A plan was hatched to house circular economy startups in the old spa changing rooms beneath the dome.

Cox is a zealot and a charmer, meaning it didn’t take long for him to sell the idea to three other sustainable entrepreneurs in architecture, consultancy and construction, and an investor who bought Tropicana in a public auction for €1.7m in October 2015. From that point on, BlueCity accelerated from a brainstorm hashed out on one of Tropicana’s many windows to an ecosystem of circular entrepreneurs. Everyone was eager to begin.

“We saw that the circular economy was an economy of consultancies writing reports and roadmaps. This is why we started doing,” explains Sabine Biesheuvel, one of the original founders. “It’s completely different to what we imagined we’d be doing in the beginning.”

The renovation is Biesheuvel’s sticking point. It’s not finished. Tropicana’s former nightclub and events centre have been converted into Rotterdam’s first circular office wing, which opened two years ago with 100 workplaces, conference rooms for hire and a communal kitchen-bar fittingly shaped in a circle. But the water park under the dome, Tropicana’s once noisy epicentre, stands quiet and vacant, its green flumes slowly flaking into gaping pools that have been dry for nearly a decade.

There’s more life stirring beneath the dome, however, on the lower level, which is partly finished. Worms compost all of BlueCity’s organic waste here in the concrete bowels of the building, which is also where the production workshops and the BlueCity Lab are located. Down here mangoes are being mashed into leather, recycled plastic is 3D-printed into new products for market and regenerative bio-based concepts, such as mycelium furniture, are being grown and tested.

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There’s also Vet & Lazy craft brewers, who are developing a pioneering chemical-free rainwater purification system, and the circular caterer Arabella van Aartrijk, who bakes cookies from Vet & Lazy’s spent grain and rescues “ugly” food. Superuse Studios, the sustainable architecture and solutions firm behind Tropicana’s circular redevelopment into BlueCity, is down here too.

The fact that all of this is going on in and around a derelict water park attracts curious visitors from around the world, who want to see the waste-as-a-resource theory in action. It gives it the edge over other similar circular innovation hubs in Europe, such as De Ceuvel in Amsterdam, CRCLR in Berlin, SPACE10 in Copenhagen or Sustainable Workspaces in London.

It’s the spectacle of BlueCity that helps it to grow and sustain itself as a private enterprise. (It has received less than 10% of its funding from the municipality and some indirect funds from the European commission for programming and projects only.) But the BlueCity spectacle also poses a dilemma for Biesheuvel, whose ultimate intention for the venture is to flip the narrative about waste in order to instigate system-wide change – not to become just another tourist attraction.

“We are a raw experience. People come here because of the raw innovation, they want to be inspired and to think differently, but they don’t really want to think differently,” explains Biesheuvel. “It’s hard to tell who is sincere about really changing and who is window dressing.”

Nevertheless, BlueCity is making measurable impact through its fast-track circular programmes that link budding entrepreneurs with corporate clients to solve real waste-stream solutions. And through its debate and events programme, the hub is arming the public and businesses with practical steps for change, or simply providing a more positive spin on waste.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest One of the in-house entrepreneurs, upcycling business VerdraaidGoed. Photograph: Sophie de Vos

“Given the focus on the circular economy and the experimental labs they facilitate, BlueCity is very valuable in the Rotterdam innovation ecosystem,” says Visser. “BlueCity is increasingly becoming the hotspot where the circular economy is created. A place where the city is reinvented through experimentation, in a healthy and sustainable way.”

But is focusing on individual residuals and micro-innovations for waste making enough of an impact when waste is such a huge problem? And are entrepreneurs really the ones to deliver the system-wide revolution required for the world to go fully circular, or in other words eliminate waste for ever?

“It’s not a matter of trying to replace everything we have with something new because that requires a huge amount of consumption and materials,” says Rupert Wyllie, an industrial designer and circular economy advocate in London. “To expect small business to scale up or change the behaviour of others in industry isn’t practical.”

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You could argue that something so radical can only come from the top down, from government policy and from companies spearheading innovation and investment, which can be a lengthy process. It’s taken the European commission more than three years to deliver the 54 actions stated in its circular economy package, and this is still only the stimulus for change, not change itself.

But the BlueCity pioneers aren’t waiting for change to trickle down in order to act. “Consumers need positive alternatives,” says Biesheuvel. “I really believe everyone wants to do something, but it’s really hard to know where to start because the problem is so big. But this is also an opportunity.”

• A chart first published with this article contained errors and has been removed

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