A successful achievement of the SDG 12 of the United Nations needs the transformation of the economy into a sustainable economy which needs to be organized as a circular economy. The main principle of it is to reuse waste and to gain new raw materials in order to realize an autarkic provision of the economy with raw materials in order to avoid the exploitation of new natural ressources due to the negative impact on the environment resulting from auch an exploitation. There might be the ideological model of autarkic communities which are able to live self-sufficiently but in reality everybody and each community depends on others. A model of sustainable economy gets very complicated and therefore is often reduced to such simple, local models of small autarkic communities. This thinking includes also the reuse of waste streams. In the simple model a circular economy is easily described as a relative homogeneous output which can be related to a relative homogeneous input or to very specific products. Nevertheless the ideas how to reach a sustainable economy are based on simple models leading to develop goals like the SDG 12 for a responsible consumption and production including the goal to strive for a circular economy. Attempts to realize circular economy have led to various meassures on national and EU level in ways that leave ideology aside like very vague defined recycling rates. Anyway with such a kind of measures the lawmakers worldwide avoid the use of real definitions and visions how a circular economy or the implementation of SDG 12 should look like. They shift the responsibility to solve this very essential problem of mankind to „free“ citizens, even if many of them deny some basic human rights. A huge obstacle to develop a more complex model for reaching a circular economy seems to be that the principles of the concept of a circular economy depend very much on the cultural background of people in different countries and settings. There seem to be differences between nations on how people imagine to realize a circular economy. Nevertheless products and waste do cross borders and therefore nations are not able to live without dependencies from other nations – if so only on a very low economical level which is wanted to overcome by realizing the SDGs. In order to realize the principles of a circular economy and therefore the achievement of the SDG 12 an international discussion has to be started with input from people from different settings. This means that partnerships for the goal to discuss these matters are needed which corresponds to the SGD 17. Therefore our project intends to contribute to the SDG 12 by persuing the SDG 17. due to the complexity of creating a cross border circular economy we won't be able to create it with our project, but we would be able to contribute to it by creating awareness about the obstacles among stakeholders and excahnge metodological good practices organzaed by the partners in their respective countriestrain them on how to approach the problem in order to accelerate international solutions that deserve to be called measures on a way to realize a real circular economy.
Our project Sustainability throught Cross Border Circular Economy (SCRCE) made it possible for the partners from Germany, Greece, Italy and Sweden to work together to develop content about the topic circular economy including its various intercultural aspects expressed by the term „cross-border“ by transfering best practices and creating several approaches to educate people about the topic. We saw the need to contribute to achieve a Circular Economy in order to support the Sustainable Development Goal 12 of the United Nations (Responsible Consumption and Production) by finding approaches to educate people in a productive way. Instead of exploting the planet with the danger to destroy peoples habitat circular economy is seen as a mean to provide reiteratively the resources within our economies. A circular economy is not easy to set in force as it needs a lot of know how and cooperation of economic actors. Implementing it is not just a matter for businesses and industry but for all citizens of all ages in their capacity as consumers. Therefore we intended to find content and approaches how to teach adults about ways how to live a circular economical lifestyle. Until the start of the project mainly the waste management sector in the EU was confronted with legislation to deal with circular economical aspects like recycling and provision of secondary raw materials to industry. Therefore starting point of the project was a questionaire to learn about the activities of waste management companies concerning the topic developed in 2016 by the coordinator of SCRCE Dr. Ludwig. We started with the Transnational Project Meeting (TPM) in Berlin in October 2018 learning about the cultures of the partners toward the topic circular economy and we started to develop an imagination how a cross border circular economy might function and what kind of measures might be applicable for it. The questionnaire raised awareness about the topic and we started a learning process in order to pose the right questions to get to the right solutions. After the TPM in Berlin all partners started to develop ideas and created updated questionnaires in English, Swedish, Italian and Greek and used them to collect reactions from stakeholders. Many questions did occur concerning circular economy, how it should look like and what should be teached to people about it. We discussed these questions a lot via e-mail and clarified a lot of questions during our TPM in April 2019 in Italy. In each TPM we visited or invited people from local best practice examples of circular economy. We did set up more than 15 record cards of best practice examples and defined their benefits for society. We used best practices and specialist literature to better our theoretical and practical knowledge in the field of circular economy. Then at the TPM in September 2019 in Sweden we distributed task amoung us to write „input papers“. We agreed to develop a manual jointly in the TPM in Athens. Between the TPM in Sweden and in Athens all partners wrote the input papers containing adult education and social aspects of a circular economy. At the TPM in Athens all partners presented their input papers, backed-up by one or more best practices that fit best to the discussed aspect. This allowed us to identify jointly several principles of circular economy and to use these principles to create the manual. In Athens in February 2020 we used the time to form smaller working groups of 4 people to look at various principles and find subitems to give hints how to indentify circular economy aspects in daily life and consumption patterns. In the plenum with all participants of the TPM we did develop the manual as an pedagogical tool containing 14 principles including 47 subitems. After the TPM we started with our blog on EPALE and did publish there 9 articles and 1 landing page. The manual was set up as a PDF containing also a QR-Code leading to our landing page. In October 2020 we organized an online workshop about the use of the manual. The workshop contained presentations by staff members of the partners and active participation of the learners using the chat function and online queries. More than 60 people from 24 countries applied to the workshop. In November we organized an international online conference with more than 70 participants where we presented the results of our project and did gain a lot of new input from important national and international stakeholders from NGOs, politics, administration and industry. During the project we reached many people by providing informations via a facebook page, the blog on Epale, visiting best practice examples and by providing the manual to learners and stakeholders. We will continue the blog on EPALE. The results of the project are already used by some partners for their education programmes. We agreed to apply for a follow-up project in order to digitalize the manual to become a better tool for teaching a circular economical lifestyle.