ACCESS - Achieving Circularity in Cities through Environmental Sustainability of Sports

The proposed project titled "Achieving Circularity in Cities through Environmental Sustainability of Sports" is looking at narrowing the gap between the current environmental performances of sports clubs and associations, their strategies and practices and strategies and targets of respective cities or regions they are located in and where their activities are taking place. While many cities and regions in Europe are following the European-wide pattern of adopting required strategies that would enhance and deploy various European policies and frameworks locally regarding waste, water, energy, mobility and other fields of environment or the Ciruclar Economy Action Plan and Green Deal in general, their successful implementation or uptake among sport organisations are rather limited and require additional efforts to achieve reqiuired contribution. The underlying factors for this are diverse and range from the shortage of qualified staff, lack of cooperation between sports clubs and associations and relevant academic bodies, low inclusion of existing staff in training and capacity building activities to general difficulties in cooperating with local and regional authorities. This project would be addressing these key challenges and turning them into enabling factors which would drive the application of circular economy solutions to sports forward. The project wants to promote innovative and replicable circular economy solutions among sports organisations as well as their cooperation and synergies with local and regional authorities which would contribute to achieving circular cities. These would lead to seizing transversal improvement opportunities by embedding circular economy and sustainability principles in city planning, infrastructure and asset management procedures as well as in sports organisations management and governance. The key goal is to activate a collaboration between urban stakeholders and sport organisations for getting closer to circular cities.