Circular economy

In a circular-economy project the interesting decision is almost always where the meter sits. At the landfill gate, at the kitchen counter, in the bin room, on the heat exchanger — because whatever the meter can see is what the scheme is able to price, reward or penalise, and everything it cannot see carries on unchanged.

This guide reads the documented record of circular projects in the atlas: metering, sorting, recovery and the markets built on top of them. Collection logistics sit in the smart waste guide; the networks that carry recovered heat are in smart grids. The plain-language definitions of pay-as-you-throw, pneumatic waste collection and district heating are in the glossary.

Four places to put the meter

1. At the household. Seoul bills food waste by the kilogram: residents tap an ID card at an RFID bin, which weighs each deposit. This is the only arrangement in the record where the person producing the waste sees a price that moves.
2. In the bin room. Shanghai made four-stream sorting compulsory in 2019 and grew a digital layer around the rule afterwards — cameras that grade the purity of a bin room and issue work orders, weighing devices on collection trucks, a platform tracking containers across all sixteen districts.
3. At the sorting plant. Oslo asks nothing of the bin at all: residents put green bags for food and coloured bags for plastic into one ordinary bin, and optical readers separate them by colour at the plant. Barcelona's vacuum network moves the material without trucks in the first place.
4. At the gate. Jakarta's Bantargebang weighs every truck in and out, flags vehicles by GPS up to ten kilometres out, and publishes the daily tonnage.

The fourth is the cautionary one, and its own entry says so: metering the gate is not the same as reducing the load. Bantargebang has weighed and tracked every truck for a decade; in March 2026 a waste slope collapsed and killed seven people, and the site's refuse-derived-fuel plant was handling about 800 tonnes a day against roughly 7,000 arriving. A perfectly instrumented flow is still a flow.

Where the money comes from

The most convincing entries here are the ones where somebody is paid. Stockholm Exergi has run its heating network as a two-way market since 2014: data centres and supermarkets near the pipes fit their own heat exchangers and sell surplus heat back at temperature-indexed prices the utility republishes daily, settled monthly. More than twenty businesses supply it. The entry's lesson is the transferable part — the pricing and metering layer, not the pipe, is what lets unrelated businesses plug into one system without individually negotiating.

Vancouver takes heat out of raw sewage before it reaches treatment and now covers about 70% of its district's heat demand that way; unusually for this genre, an independent rate review checked that the utility's prices stay within the city's own ceiling over the regional grid, rather than taking the operator's word for it. Dresden's main treatment plant runs on roughly 85% of its own electricity from sludge biogas, rooftop solar and a turbine in its outflow. Karachi's Red Line pairs its bus fleet with a biogas plant fed by cattle waste, and Amsterdam's stadium built a large part of its battery out of used electric-car packs.

Counting people, not only tonnes

The oldest circular system in this atlas is not a machine. After the 2001 crisis Buenos Aires stopped policing its cartoneros and registered them: a compulsory register of waste pickers and cooperatives, credentials, work clothing, and assigned collection zones. Twelve cooperatives now run the sorting centres, and the city publishes every zone and every plant as open geodata with the cooperative that works it named.

It also publishes its own blind spot, which is why the entry is worth reading next to the sensor projects: recovered tonnage appears by plant type, not by cooperative, so nobody outside city hall can say which cooperative recovered what. A formalisation scheme is auditable only to the depth its register is public.

Material that has not been thrown away yet

A smaller group tries to move the meter upstream of the bin entirely. Amsterdam logs what a building is made of in a digital material passport, so the fabric can be reused rather than sorted after demolition; eight municipalities in the region followed with passports of their own. It is the most conceptually ambitious idea in this corpus and the least evidenced — no entry here yet documents material actually recovered from a passported building.

What the record does not support

Three patterns recur. Hardware layered onto a broken service does not fix it: Rome put sensor-equipped compacting bins onto a chronically troubled collection system, and Beijing's smart-bin layer remains district pilots beside a citywide legal mandate. The bottleneck is usually upstream of the technology: Oslo's optical readers sort correctly every bag that reaches them, and the constraint sits at the kitchen counter. And a good story is not a mechanism: Surabaya's bus line that sold rides for plastic bottles drew worldwide attention and switched to an ordinary cash fare in 2022 — what kept the service running for seven years was the fare and a growing subsidy, not the bottles.

Questions readers ask

The takeaway

Ask where the meter sits, and who receives money because of what it reads. Seoul prices the household, Stockholm pays the supplier, Buenos Aires pays the cooperative, Vancouver sells heat it used to flush away. Where the meter only watches — at a gate, on a truck, above a bin — the record in this atlas shows an accurate picture of a problem that did not get smaller.