Exploring Circular Berlin with the Circular Economy Tours

Circular Berlin had the honour to be an invited guide for Circular Economy Tours.

Claudi from Circular economy tours and Dina from Circular Berlin showed Berlin circular spots for the International Social Entrepreneurs from Hive.
Very motivated people from different countries were very curious to learn about operational examples of the circularity in Berlin city.First stop of the tour was INFARM, demonstrating its indoor vertical hydroponic farming system. INFARM was founded by 2 brothers coming from Israel. Right now it is the high-tech approach to grow anything from herbs, lettuce and other vegetables and even fruit. the company can do vertical farming on a small but infinitely expandable scale and is seeing Infarm place farms not in offsite warehouses but in customer-facing city locations, such as grocery stores, restaurants, shopping malls, and schools, enabling the end-customer to actually pick the products themselves.

The journey went further to DYCLE, a startup developing a technology for biodegradable diapers. Ayumi and Christian explained the whole process behind their project and the advantage of Terra Preta soil substrate, which they get as a final output product. The project will create small communities of around 100 families each living in the same neighbourhood, meeting regularly at the diapers distribution/collection points, planting fruit trees together, living their lives in a more connected way. What is very important to consider that in the end, it is not about selling diapers, but it is about selling trees, as Terra Preta is a high-quality compost. This different approach to the product development impacts the whole circular economy business model and demonstrates that if the transition will take place from linear to the circular system, the change in the business mindset is essential.
Further, on our way to Café Botanico, we visited CRCLR House, as a place promoting circular economy practice in different way. Right now the location itself stays in the transition phase, as in the future CRCLR House will try to implement the first project for the circular building.

The group was brought to the Café Botanico for final dinner where Claudi explained about the focus of the restaurant, promoting seasonal selection of the additionally purchased product and its 1000 square meters of permaculture forest garden with organic certification. Really interesting place to see how such forest works in the middle of the city.