Published by
Want to get more news about circular economy?
Circular News Digest: July 2026
What’s moving the circular economy in Berlin this month? We’ve curated the latest policy updates, local Berlin initiatives, and Circular Economy innovations across packaging, construction, electronics and textile.
Launching the Circular Economy Hub Berlin
he newly launched Circular Economy Hub Berlin provides a free, open-access digital competence platform designed to help businesses take their first practical steps toward circularity.
The platform offers easy-to-understand modules, explainer videos, comprehensive guides, and quizzes tailored for daily business operations. It provides clear orientation along the established R-strategies of the circular economy, helping companies identify exactly where to start. To move from theory to practice, the hub highlights real-world, industrial good-practice examples directly from Berlin.
Explore the Platform: ce-hub.berlin
Updates from Circular Electronics
Unlocking the E-Waste in Our Drawers
With an estimated 170 to 200 million unused smartphones and tablets gathering dust in German households, Deutsche Telekom, Interzero, and missio Aachen are teaming up to extract these urban resources. They have relaunched the Telekom Mobile Phone Collection Center to tackle the main barrier to electronics recycling: consumers’ data security fears.
Interzero manages the entire reverse logistics chain. This includes certified data wiping and professional assessment to ensure devices are either refurbished for a second life or safely recycled to recover valuable metals like gold and silver.
For every device collected, 50 cents go to one of twelve partner organizations. This includes the Catholic relief organization missio Aachen, which uses the funds to support families in Ghana living near the Agbogbloshie e-waste dump.
Updates from Circular Packaging
prepared by Casper van Alfen
Potsdam’s single-use packaging tax took effect July 1. Pressure now on Berlin.
The tax applies from July 1, 2026 to all restaurants, Imbisse, cafés with to-go offers. Whoever uses reusables pays nothing. A coalition of DUH, Mehrwegverband, Recup and 22 other organizations explicitly calls on Berlin and other Brandenburg cities to follow, and a DUH survey shows eight more Brandenburg cities interested.
PPWR becomes fully applicable on August 12th.
With the European Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) taking effect, companies will face a fundamental re-organization of their processes, including packaging but also handling of data, information, and supply chains.
PPWR covers all packaging placed on the EU market regardless of material or origin. From that date, every packaging type needs a written EU Declaration of Conformity, the PFAS ban in food-contact packaging applies, and the minimization duty starts. Companies will have to record, document, and make information available along the supply chain in a standardised way, and data must be complete, correct, and unambiguous.
Germany’s reusable beverage quota stays far below target.
New official figures published this July show the reusable beverage quota stood at 34.5% in 2024, a mere 0.2 points up on the year before, against a target of 70%. The longer trend stings more: since the deposit obligation started in 2003, the quota has fallen from 63.7% to under 35%. Roughly 94 million liters of beverage did shift from single-use to reusable packaging year-on-year, so things are moving; just very slowly.
Updates from Circular Construction
prepared by Jerry Popoola
Berlin’s Local Circular Construction Updates
The Berlin Senate has passed the “Law for Simple Construction” Gesetz für einfaches Bauen (GEB) in May. Framed as a housing and cost-reduction measure for affordable housing in Berlin, the legislation is designed for the speed and volume of new builds, while also affecting the adaptive reuse of existing structures. Projects involving Umnutzung (repurposing/change of use) and attic conversions are exempt from modern thermal, acoustic, and vibration retrofitting mandates for existing building parts. The primary impact for the circular sector is that Bestandstransformation is administratively simplified, which alters the regulatory conditions for demolition. Finally, this framework codifies “Building Type E,” establishing a legally recognized “simple and experimental” building category.
TU Berlin progress with B(e) Ware Hub
The Reallabor B(e) Ware, led by the Natural Building Lab at TU Berlin together with ZRS, has entered its implementation phase. The testing bed is expanding its scope from structural timber to include secondary components such as reclaimed steel girders. Salvaged materials harvested from regional demolition sites are cataloged and processed at a central material hub in Spandau to establish a supply pipeline for structural elements. To test blueprints for damage diagnostics and regulatory compliance, the project is implementing these secondary structures into three localized pilot builds: the TULIUM museum pavilion (Charlottenburg), a DLRG water rescue station at Lake Müggelsee, and a workshop facility in Lichtenberg.
Low-Tech Holz-Lehmbau Campus Nears Completion
In Weissensee, architecture firm Architecture firm Sauerbruch Hutton and developer B&O Bau are nearing completion on the Holz-Lehmbau Campus Berlin (HLCB), a project functioning as a real-world laboratory (Reallabor) for circular, low-tech construction. The project utilized the site’s existing concrete surfaces by slicing and restacking them into new foundations to reduce new concrete usage. Designed for disassembly, the structure utilizes local pine wood, straw, and a glue-free wood-clay hybrid ceiling developed alongside Bauhaus Erde. The building regulates its climate via passive, low-tech systems.
Updates from Textile
Berlin AI textile sorting startup reverse.fashion lands seven-figure
The Berlin-based AI startup reverse.fashion has indeed secured a seven-figure extension to its pre-seed funding round from High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF). Announced in July 2026, this investment is aimed at addressing a major bottleneck in the textile circular economy by scaling the company’s automated sorting technology.
reverse.fashion develops AI-powered systems that utilize computer vision, machine learning, and advanced sensing to automatically categorize and digitize used garments. The system analyzes items in real-time based on criteria like material composition, condition, brand, and style.
