Introduction

The Circular Economy Routemap identifies a series of new regional opportunities for which business case development is now in progress. These include:

• A Circular Manufacturing Centre of Excellence to support circular design best practice; to develop advanced technologies (robotics, AI); and to test new technologies and processes for end of life resource recovery.
• A High-Value Fuels from Waste cluster to use advanced processing technologies to turn residual, municipal and industrial waste into high value fuels for aviation, logistics, heavy plant and other manufacturing sectors.
• Zero Construction Hubs to recover and exchange materials, as well as share and incentivise circular design and processes.
• A Circular Build Product Initiative to create a suite of regional circular building products, to increase the number of circular products and services, to support regional job creation.
• A Circular Agro-business Network to mobilise circular food supply chains, to reduce resource consumption and pollution, to support further R&D in sustainable agro-business processes.
• Local circular food hubs with optimised logistics to collect and redistribute food that would otherwise be wasted and improve local communities’ access to healthy, affordable food, to reduce waste food, and to ensure better redistribution of food.