IGPN - International Green Purchasing Network

May 12, 2025

Espoo uses circular economy and procurement to involve residents in urban development

The City of Espoo (Finland) has decided to transform Kera, a formerly industrial/logistic area into a sustainable city district, in line with circular economy principles. Public procurement plays a key role here, which is why the Big Buyers Working Together (BBWT) Community of Practice (CoP) on New European Bauhaus (NEB) visited it during the BBWT annual event in Helsinki.
Espoo’s work in the Kera district is founded on four key principles established in the Kera development commitment. It points out that everything should be done in close cooperation with residents and other stakeholders and that Espoo must make use of low-emission and carbon binding solutions to help its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2030. Furthermore, the circular economy principles should be implemented whenever possible, and the district is obliged to draw up a development plan highlighting how the solutions are implemented so that Kera can become an (inter)national reference point.
The goals of the commitment were defined in extensive cooperation with local operators and stakeholders and the city takes a similar approach in the implementation of its solutions. Although in Kera this approach is formalised, the city had positive experiences with collaborative market and citizen engagement from the past. A great example was a project focusing on the development of procurement criteria for construction plastics. To define these criteria, the city interviewed plastic suppliers as well as public authorities; based on these interviews it developed a draft it presented in an interactive workshop, representing the entire value chain, highlighting what is feasible or not and which demands can be met.
In the end, the developed criteria, which ended up being applied to Kera as well, required suppliers to collect their waste on all construction sites, track the percentage of recycled material, and get more data on it. Furthermore, the tender criteria sought to align to some extent with the national ecological criteria on plastic recycling, requiring suppliers to apply certain ecological agreements in practice.
For the NEB CoP these insights proved highly valuable. Even though the project was not planned with the NEB principles in mind it was still aligned with its values. Participants were very keen to learn about Espoo’s collaborative approaches, concluding that municipalities should engage more with the private sector as it has valuable procedural knowledge.
More details at ICLEI Sustainable Procurement Platform.

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