Amsterdam adopted British economist Kate Raworth’s Doughnut model as the framework for its circular city strategy. The Doughnut defines a safe and just space for humanity: meeting social foundations (health, food, housing, education) without exceeding environmental ceilings (climate change, land conversion, biodiversity loss, chemical pollution). Amsterdam is the first city to formally adopt this framework as governing policy.
That’s a significant design choice. It means Amsterdam is measuring success against human wellbeing and planetary boundaries simultaneously, rather than defaulting to GDP or carbon metrics alone.
The Policy Framework
Amsterdam’s circular strategy, launched in 2015 with a 2050 horizon, is organized around five strategic choices: polycentric development, growth within limits, healthy and sustainable mobility, rigorous greening, and making the city together (citizen co-creation).
The most operationally interesting component is the purchasing reform. Amsterdam is implementing circular criteria in tendering processes for construction projects, requiring that materials in public construction be traceable, reusable, and with documented end-of-life pathways. When the city’s own procurement requires circular design, it creates market demand that shifts what private-sector suppliers develop and offer.
The municipality has also established “free zones”: experimental areas where companies can test new methods of collecting, sorting, and processing waste outside normal regulatory constraints. This innovation infrastructure is how Amsterdam is developing the circular economy practices that don’t yet exist rather than only deploying ones that do.
Marineterrein Living Lab
The Marineterrein (a historic naval site in Amsterdam) was redeveloped as a living lab for circular principles: buildings constructed with material passports documenting every component, so that materials can be recovered and reused at end-of-life without the materials becoming anonymous waste.
The material passport concept is the circular economy’s most practical infrastructure innovation. When every material in a building has a documented type, quantity, and location, the building becomes a materials bank rather than a sunk cost. When it’s eventually demolished, the components don’t become undifferentiated rubble: they become catalogued inventory for the next construction project.
The Marineterrein Living Lab demonstrated that this is operationally possible and measurably effective: waste and CO2 emissions were substantially reduced compared to conventional construction.
Amsterdam’s circular strategy is most interesting at the system level: it’s redesigning the conditions under which private-sector circular innovation is rational rather than heroic. When procurement requires circularity, when free zones reduce regulatory barriers to experimentation, and when material passports make recovery economically viable, circular business models become the obvious choice rather than the idealistic one.
The Amsterdam Circular Startup Program
Amsterdam Circular is a two-month, cost-free program supporting entrepreneurs developing circular economy solutions for urban challenges. The specific gap it addresses is capital: pre-seed and seed-stage circular entrepreneurs often have access to public capital but struggle to secure private investment.
Guy Vincent, Programme Lead, has framed the goal as connecting circular startups to both private and public capital while demonstrating a model other European cities can replicate. This is city-as-platform logic: Amsterdam gains circular innovation it couldn’t develop internally; entrepreneurs gain access to the regulatory environment and procurement relationships that give their ideas commercial viability.
For retailers and social enterprises considering circular business models, Amsterdam is one of the few cities where the policy environment actively helps rather than merely permits. The combination of procurement requirements, experimental zones, and startup support creates a density of circular economy activity that makes Amsterdam a useful laboratory for what’s next.
P.S. Circle Economy (the Amsterdam-based nonprofit that has been integral to the city’s circular strategy) publishes annual research on circular economy progress and business model innovation that’s among the most practically useful freely available resources in this space.