Territory type: City

Population: 215000

Organisation/Company: The Municipality of Almere

Type of organisation: Public authority

Link to website: https://www.almere.nl/

Almere is the youngest city in the Netherlands with 215,000 inhabitants, and is located close to Amsterdam. Almere is surrounded by water and has a lot of green areas within the city limits. In Almere, biowaste has always been collected separately and composted. This system allows residents to collect the produced compost for their own gardens. A few years ago Almere started processing other biomass waste streams from the city in the best possible, most circular way. The first residual flow was aquatic plants. These plants are a kind of weed and are mowed every year and then were thrown away. Due to a public-private partnership with several companies, Almere have found great opportunities for the use of these aquatic plants; for example, paper and composite are now made from them, and they are also being processed into concrete. The latest innovation is traffic signs made from giant hogweed. Almere still struggle to scale up pilot projects. Often the projects are small, but precisely this increase in scale is what is needed to make a feasible business case.