Like many other cities, Wuppertal is characterised by a high volume of waste due to linear production and consumption patterns. At the same time, the city has established itself as an innovation laboratory for a variety of innovative forms of circular economy, such as repair, rental and unpackaged options. Accordingly, the Smart City Strategy of the City of Wuppertal, which was adopted in 2023, includes the specific sub-area "resource conservation and circularity". Wuppertal wants to play a pioneering role in the field of intelligent, digitally supported waste avoidance (smart waste). This is the starting point for the "Smart Circular Wuppertal" project, which runs from April 2025 to March 2028 under the coordination of Wuppertal’s Smart City Center and is funded by the federal state programme "EFRE: Circular Economy – CircularCities.NRW": Together with the city, the "Collaborating Centre on Sustainable Consumption and Production" (CSCP) and Neue Effizienz, the Wuppertal Institute is developing a digital platform that maps the effects of waste prevention measures in terms of the circular economy in real time and will be available to the city – as well as to all citizens in the form of a dashboard. To this end, the project aims to connect existing structures and develop new options that can be accessed via a shared platform.
The development of the platform will be tested during the implementation and monitoring of two pilot projects in the area of refuse and repair:
- In the pilot project "WiederGut" (english roughly: GoodAgain), the local repair sector is to be specifically promoted and interconnected, in particular by the project partner "Aufbruch am Arrenberg". The aim is to collect, bundle, evaluate and visualise repair data.
- The pilot project "MehrwegTal" (english roughly: ReusableValley) aims to develop a sustainable catering offering with mainly regional organic meals in reusable boxes for out-of-home catering in public and private institutions in Wuppertal, including a transparent analysis and implementation of the underlying value creation networks.