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I have learned that at least some sense of urgency exists in each
product chain or region. Some market frontrunners have already
developed circular products and services which are bought by a
growing group of consumers and commercial customers. Local
authorities increasingly use their purchasing power to prime the
market for circular products and services and improve their waste
management practices.
It is, however, a major challenge to bundle these scattered activities
and build circular initiatives that can be scaled up and ultimately
mainstreamed. With so much hassle involved in starting a joint
initiative, individual actors often abstain from taking the lead. Each
often works in a specific silo, failing to oversee how to generate
a transformational change with all actors needed throughout the
product chain or region. They tend to restrict themselves to what
they can do in their own organisation, waiting to see whether
someone else will take the collective lead for change.
In all the initiatives described in the previous two chapters, one
or more actors felt the urgency to take action. How the shared
sense of urgency was experienced or created depended on the
actors involved and the initiative’s complexity and scale. When the
number of actors is limited and the scale of the initiative is just
the Netherlands, such as in the mattresses case, it is much easier
to instil a shared sense of urgency. Compare that to the clothing
case, which proved much more challenging. In the concrete case,
a shared sense of urgency was created during the process because
more and more stakeholders spoke out, which gradually led to
more clout power.
In the mattresses case, waste management companies expressed
worries about the risks of storing and incinerating mattresses, and
recyclers were concerned about the high costs of recycling, but the
Amsterdam Economic Board created the shared sense of urgency.
Being familiar with the stalemate between waste management
companies, recyclers and mattress producers, the Board and the