The Polish city’s experiment shows what a single location can manage on its own.
Can a pilot in one Polish city offer a model for closing the loop on waste across Central and Eastern Europe? In Gdynia, that question is being tested in practice, at a time when the European Commission is preparing to finalise its long-awaited Circular Economy Act.
Since November 2023, the Baltic port city has been part of Creative Circular Cities (CCC), a 3.98 million euros project co-funded through the EU’s Interreg Baltic Sea Region Programme. The initiative brings together six municipalities—Gdynia, Riga, Tallinn, Aarhus, Kiel and Turku—to explore how local authorities, creative industries and communities can rethink the resources already available to them. Gdynia has focused on one of the EU’s less-documented waste streams: bulky waste.
The data gap is significant. Eurostat places bulky waste in a broad ‘other’ category of municipal waste, alongside textiles, batteries and electronic equipment. Together, these streams account for around 34 million tonnes, or 14.5 per cent of EU municipal waste, but the data offers no further breakdown. Several member states, including Poland, do not conduct full compositional analyses of this residual waste, leaving policymakers with an incomplete picture.
Pomeranian Science and Technology Park (PPNT Gdynia) and the Pomorskie in the European Union Association set out to address part of that gap by mapping who generates bulky waste in the city and who could potentially reuse it. The project also brought residents, designers and businesses into the same conversation.
The result was ‘Podaj dalej – Share it’, a prototype circular bulky-waste service inspired in part by Aarhus’s UPCYCL scheme, which connects surplus industrial materials with businesses that can use them. Following its local pilot, the Gdynia team is developing a guidance webpage intended to help other municipalities adapt the model.
“Bulky waste is probably one of the clearest opportunities cities have to practise circularity without waiting for new infrastructure,” says Urszula Kasińska of the PPNT Gdynia Design Centre. “Our goal was to understand how designers, businesses, residents, and public and cultural institutions could work together to keep these materials in circulation.”
That question of replication is central to CCC. “A single municipality’s pilot, when documented and shared, can become something other cities adapt rather than reinvent,” says Rafał Rolka, Project Coordinator at the “Pomorskie in the European Union” Association.
The project’s Transition Lab, held in Gdynia this spring, brought partners together to examine whether approaches developed in one city can work elsewhere. For cities across CEE, that may prove as important as the pilot itself: turning local experiments into models that can be adapted and scaled.
The remaining challenge is financial. What happens when EU project funding ends, particularly when linear waste solutions remain cheaper? And will cities have access to the skills needed to make circular systems work?
As Brussels shapes the next stage of EU circular economy policy, Gdynia’s experience highlights both the potential of local experimentation and the policy and financing infrastructure needed to move circularity from pilot projects into everyday practice.
Photo: Dreamstime.