Learning by doing: how supporting experimentation on the field can make the difference

• What are the financial risks linked to renting out products instead of selling? ‘Samenlevingsopbouw West-Vlaanderen’ and Bosch put it to the test in their project Papillon, where people living in energy poverty could rent household appliances at reasonable prices. The project identified several problems with this business model: more research is needed into how to divide these financial risks.
• Which legal context is needed to offer products as a service? The Limburg-based plastic recycling business Eco-Oh! offered city councils public seating furniture as ‘product as a service’. The city councils, however, had trouble with the calls for tender for services rather than products. They preferred to buy the furniture, and then pay a return fee.

• How do we launch bioproduction in Flanders? Green space manager Pro Natura and bioproduction collective Glimps mapped out the opportunities and threats for biomaterials in Flanders. In the meantime, they built an ecosystem that opens doors for future biomaterial innovation.
• Which bottlenecks exist for circular economy in construction? Two organisations found out in their Open Call: BC Architects & Studies’ architects make construction material from soil that is dug up from building sites. The regulations around this turned out to be a hassle. At the VUB the engineering-architecture department turned an unused student room into an experimentation space ‘Circular Retrofit Lab’ where modular building and ‘product as a service’ are being put to the test.

Simply going for something and doing it can lead to unexpected insights. For deconstructing their circular gasmetres, energy distribution firm Fluvius collaborated with social enterprises. Strategic employee Tom Rosseel shares the unexpected progress they made: ‘It was like a domino effect. I had a whole plan about what we were going to do with the metres, and we’d built the project around that idea. But when, at a certain point, a few new ideas popped up, we listened to them and let them happen. For example, we could immediately reuse the connective materials in our metres which had never been connected to the net. That wasn’t a huge surprise, but it was unexpected added value. Through starting something, you open a path to learning, and you encounter some much desired, though sometimes undesired, side-effects.

Steven Desair from the food waste collective Eatmosphere found out what did and didn’t work during the scale-up of food products based on leftovers. ‘Scaling up production is a challenge. By trying you notice that some products decrease in quality, or maybe that it’s just not feasible at a larger scale, or that the pricing isn’t right.’

By doing, you can reach new heights. Magda Peeters from MAAKbar in Leuven also found this out: ‘I’m not an architect who makes designs. I just do, try, fail, experiment, and take whatever works with me.’

Mental space

For many, the support Circular Flanders offers is a mental nudge in the right direction. The subsidy adds a quality label, and acts as a vote of confidence. It adds credibility so new partners can be convinced, which can result in more buy-in and more impactful projects. Filip Vangeel at Valipac, the organisation which takes charge of Extended Producer Responsibility in the field of industrial packaging, describes it as follows: ‘Our goal was to bring together the entire supply chain. Thanks to Circular Flanders’ subsidy, we received the ‘mandate’ so to speak, to focus on this and to bring together the right people and to align everyone’s views. For our partners, it was important that we were able to say “the government is behind us.”’