In order to ensure the participation of stakeholders coming from different backgrounds, the meeting was organized in cooperation with the City of Espoo and the Helsinki Region Environmental Services Authority (HSY). More than 20 stakeholders attended the workshop, including representatives of research institutions, authorities, board members of HSY and the Reuse Centre, in addition to citizens of the city of Espoo. The participants were divided into three working groups, each of them was given a topic to discuss that was gathered from the interviews. They were asked to identify the problems of the current situation and find possible solutions, with the opportunity to focus the discussion on the area of interest that they found more interesting.
The present state of reuse was presented during the meeting by Marjut Mäntynen from HSY and the Subtract project was introduced by Kati Hinkkanen. As the situation of reuse has been quite stable for some time in Finland, not many new ideas were added to the conclusions of the current situation.
The results of the workshop include two different first drafts of a design for the Circular Economy Centre, where reuse is combined with other circular economy providers. One group also proposed to start testing new services to be included in the Circular Economy Centre and suggested several ideas on how to implement the current situation.
As a conclusion, the kick-off meeting proceeded a bit further in the project plan than previously planned but the results were very encouraging. There are several ideas to be developed in the next steps in reuse in Finland.