Last week the leaked IPCC’s draft report (due to be published 2022) warns us of accelerating climate devastation and paints a distressing picture of how climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades. The global average temperature has already reached 1,1°C above the pre-industrial period, and on current trends, we’re heading for 3°C at best. As Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank and author of the landmark Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change put it: “The world is confronting a complex set of interwoven challenges, and unless we tackle them together, we are not going to do very well on any of them”.
Smart & Clean has been working hard to create climate solutions together with the Helsinki metropolitan cities, companies, universities, R&D institutions, and the Finnish state for the last five years. Our work ends today, and it is time to thank our board, the supervisory board, our partners, and all of our stakeholders for working on impactful climate and circular solutions with us. We believe that the sort of pioneering work that we were able to test in the Helsinki Metropolitan region for five years, will have many follow-up developments in the world. Read here the key learnings from our work.
Smart & Clean has developed a model on how to make system wide changes in public-private collaboration. The model can be used in any change desired, and we have used it in a concrete way in our flagship project Closed Plastic Circle, where the goal is to comprehensively cover the entire life cycle of plastic, from product design to collection and reprocessing into new products. Read (in Finnish) how the Closed Plastic Circle project is going to continue after Smart & Clean is no longer the orchestrator in the process, and learn about some very topical studies around the recycling of construction plastics (in Finnish).