Europe recycles just 12% of the materials it uses. Here’s how training can accelerate the transition to a circular economy

Marina Schmitz, Mirjana Matešić, Mislav Ante Omazić, European Academy of Management (EURAM)

Since January 2024, ten organisations in four European countries have been working on the following question: If Europe is serious about circular economy, who is actually going to teach people how to run one? Become, short for Boosting Circular Economy Expertise through learning communities, is a project that was designed to do just this. Co-funded by Erasmus+, it runs until mid-2027, bringing together four universities, two vocational colleges and four employers from across Finland, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Bulgaria.

The consortium first mapped existing and missing circular skills in its four regions. The gap analysis that was carried out was then backed up by the development of modular training materials and a training week in Bled (Slovenia) in May 2025 for around thirty educators, followed by a second week for twenty company practitioners in March 2026. Circular hubs and local learning communities are also operating in all four countries.

The number that should alert us

Eurostat reported that 12.2% of the materials used in the EU in 2024 came from recycled sources. The 2020 Circular Economy Action Plan promised to double that share by 2030, an ambition the Clean Industrial Deal now sets at 24%. The European Environment Agency has done the arithmetic: hitting it would require more than 1.7 percentage points of progress every year, more than Europe managed in total between 2010 and 2024.

The Circularity Gap Report 2026 from Circle Economy and Deloitte, counts money rather than tonnes: €25.4 trillion of avoidable value lost every year to linear material use. For every €3 created worldwide, around €1 is lost.

What Europe’s governments have actually promised

Nearly every member state has a plan: the European Environment Agency counts 20 out of 27 with a national strategy or action plan. Despite circular efforts across the EU, the European Court of Auditors still concluded in 2023 that the transition was “slow”.

We looked at the four member states involved in the Become project, their circular commitments and where they presently stand in relation to the goals they set:

• The Netherlands

Europe’s leader for recycled materials set out to become fully circular by 2050; originally vouching to halve the use of new raw materials by 2030, but in 2025 the government backtracked by replacing that target with a 15% cut by 2035 after its own analysts judged the old one unrealistic.

• Finland

The Nordic country delivered the world’s first national circular economy roadmap (2016); and set a target for resource use not to exceed 2015 levels. While Finland has the advantage of deep expertise and industrial pilots, it also has the lowest circular material use rate in the EU alongside Ireland despite good waste recycling, which might be due to the country’s focus on its mining and forestry industries.

• Slovenia

Slovenia put in place a roadmap and hosted Europe’s Circular Economy Hotspot event in Ljubljana in September 2025. Ljubljana separately collects around two thirds of household waste, the best of any EU capital, and Slovenia recycles more municipal waste than the EU average. Its recycled share of materials used, though, stays below it. Slovenia’s municipal waste recycling rate was 52.2% in 2023, one of only eight EU countries to meet the 50% target, against an EU-27 average of 43.3%. So Slovenia recycles above the EU average. Only its circular material use rate (8.8%) sits below it.

• Bulgaria

Bulgaria has laid out a strategy and an action plan that runs until 2027 with a national deposit return scheme in preparation that needs to be fully in operation by 2029. The environment ministry reports under 17% of household waste is recycled.

For all of them, ambition is not the constraint. Where a target finally meets delivery, it is usually the target that moves. The most effective policies often run into funding limitations rather than lacklustre demand, which is an unusual way for a policy to fail.

Where are circular practices being observed?

Construction moves more material than any industry in Europe. Heijmans, the Dutch partner, began measuring the material flows of its own projects in 2021 and now uses roughly 50% recycled granulate in its concrete shells. At Schiphol airport it helped build a marketplace for used building materials so removed components could get claimed, not crushed.

Textiles show the gap between rules and reality. Since January 2025, every EU country has had to collect used clothing separately, but collection is not recycling. In southwest Finland, LSJH and Rester run Europe’s first industrial textile refinement plant which turns worn-out or ‘end-of-life’ clothing back into fibre. Sweden supplies the cautionary half: Renewcell built a world-first cotton recycling plant, won contracts with major brands, and went bankrupt in 2024 because the orders never followed through at the promised scale. Technology worked. The purchasing decisions did not.

Carmaking is a fine example of commitment to the move toward a circular economy. Renault turned its historic car plant at Flins in France into the Refactory, reconditioning vehicles, remanufacturing parts and repairing batteries, targeting around €2 billion in circular revenue by 2030. Tellingly, it had to open its own training centre, because the skills were lacking on the labour market.

Researchers at Maastricht University have collected 84 companies across 15 sectors in a Regenerative Business Case Database, each answering on a case study level the question that defines a regenerative economy: can a business leave its surroundings better than it found them?

The part policy cannot deliver

Technology was not the hard part in any of the cases mentioned above. The obstacles all sat in a management meeting: a procurement rule that rewards the lowest unit price, a dashboard that counts tonnes of waste removed rather than value retained, a business case in which reuse pays back delivers results a year later than the linear option, and a workforce nobody trained.

Three questions that are worth putting on any management agenda this year:

• Who is allowed to approve a reused material, and what happens if it costs more?

• Which of our numbers would change if we tracked value retained instead of waste disposed?

• Who is teaching our people to do this work, given that no European country currently has enough people on the ground for implementing circular economy principles?

Which brings us full circle – and back to that question from January 2024. Waiting for the Circular Economy Act, (expected from the Commission later this year) is not a strategy. Building the people who can implement it is. In practice this is threefold: map the skills you actually lack before commissioning any training, teach educators and practitioners together based on real-life problems rather than case studies, and aim at the middle of the organisation: the buyers, maintenance planners and finance staff who decide whether a reused component is ever approved.

Note: None of it has to be built from scratch. Become’s practitioner training comes with educator materials and implementation worksheets for practitioners that will be published in autumn 2026 on the project’s dedicated website and are free to use and modify for anyone who wishes to make the transition to a circular economy.

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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.