Resource & Waste Management

"Circular Copenhagen" is the name of the City of Copenhagen's Resource and Waste Management Plan for 2019-2024.

The plan focuses on circular economy and aims to reduce the amount of waste sent for incineration.

Circular Copenhagen has two main objectives

• 70 % of household and light industrial and commercial waste to be sorted and collected for recycling
• Tripling reuse

More waste sorting, better opportunities for reuse, innovative collaborations with companies on sorting, reuse, recycling, and new technical solutions are pivotal points in the plan.

The challenge

Currently, a lot of limited resources are considered waste after usage. They are thus thrown away to be burned and not coming back. Therefore, even more resources must be included in a circular economy, rather than being taken out of circulation. In Copenhagen, we want to be better at reusing and sorting our waste for recycling.

Our approach

We are working to achieve the goals of 70 percent sorting and tripling reuse through a range of activities such as:

• Establishing approx. 550 public sorting points
• New local recycling hubs and better reuse facilities at recycling stations
• Waste sorting in Copenhagen's citizen-oriented institutions
• More sorting, particularly of food waste and plastics
• New technological solutions for post-sorting of residual waste