It’s hard to believe that on June 14th it will be a year since Circular Philadelphia formally launched. As we made clear at our spring membership meeting on June 7th, we promised our members that we would demand and facilitate action to drive the circular economy forward, and we’ve made good on that promise. To take stock of all we accomplished in our first year, we’re proud to present our Year One Progress Report: Let’s Get Circular!
Before we get to the action aspect, we want to celebrate that over the past year we have gained 72 individual members and 33 organizational members, with those numbers growing every week. We had 18 speaking engagements and participated in 6 outreach events this spring thanks to the return of in-person events. We grew our Instagram followers to more than 1,200, and we had 4,600 new users visit our website.
We also put together an extremely strong board of talented and diverse individuals that are laying the groundwork for an organization that is strong and viable at its foundation. And we are waiting to hear any day now on our official 501(c)3 status (and we’re very thankful for the continued fiscal sponsorship from The Sustainability Nexus in the meantime).
We gained our first sponsor, Vicinity Energy, and we are continuing to engage in contracts with organizations like OLIN Labs on their extremely exciting glass to sand soil project with Circular Philadelphia members Bottle Underground and Bennett Compost.
At our fall members meeting, we heard that members wanted to see us accomplish three things. The first was a deeper role and engagement in the sector-specific work that we are doing in regards to food systems, built environment and textiles. In January of 2022, we launched these working groups and highlights of the work accomplished in each sector are captured in this report.
Notable highlights include:
- Working with the Philadelphia Health Department to change a regulation to allow food businesses to offer reusable containers by right.
- Developing how-to guides and conducting webinars on reusable containers to drive adoption by food businesses.
- Creating a toolkit for developers, contractors and architects on tax incentives and streamlined permitting processes for deconstruction projects.
- Quantifying the scope and scale of textile waste in the region as well as local markets for recycled fibers.
(Download or read the full report online here.)
The second piece was that our membership wanted Circular Philadelphia to consider Philadelphia’s 40,000 vacant lots as 40,000 opportunities to increase circularity and community. So we created a working group solely for vacant land and began work with a great group of partners to create a process to collect data on how to engage community and circular businesses in activating these vacant lots. You can read more about that work on our brand new vacant land page.
And finally, members wanted to take part in our mission to grow the circularity community. Not only does the Year One Progress Report contain some really moving and passionate testimonials on how our members and partners value and work with Circular Philadelphia, but we are actively working with our members to create mutually beneficial opportunities to engage new members through the members ambassadors resources we developed in the last year.
To further grow the community of circular enterprises and equitably acknowledge the existing ones in the Philadelphia region, we initiated the Circular Scavenger Hunt to collect information on those businesses and highlight their efforts. And in March 2022, we created an online members directory as a searchable source of information about circular businesses in the region to give them visibility and help grow their businesses.
(Download or read the full report online here.)
Needless to say, it has been an exciting and impactful year for Circular Philadelphia and this report is a testament to that. We are on a roll. If you’re a member, thanks for all you have contributed to make this first year a success. If you’re not a member, we hope you consider signing up and help us keep rolling.
Towards a circular future for Philadelphia,
-The Circular Philadelphia Team
Leave a Reply