Lille’s regeneration plan and circularity

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The French city of Lille, which is located in the North of France, is one of the first French cities that has started adopting circular economy strategies.  

The circular economy in Lille started in the 2000s with two waste-to-energy plants producing biogas, electricity, and more recently heat from household waste. By adopting circular economy strategies, the city of Lille has developed a positive impact on the environment to increase sustainability.

The city has started many important projects including the regeneration of the factories and wastelands that remained from its industrial history. One of the city’s main strategies is building business parks as a part of the urban regeneration plan.

This strategy includes the creation of the Charter for 21st Century Business Parks. This was created to improve quality and sustainability and provide citizens with more business opportunities.

The city of Lille also adopted the cradle-to-cradle (C2C) concept, which enables buildings to be reconfigured, recycled, dismantled, and used elsewhere. An example is the La Lainière Project House. It is a building that was created to act as a resource and a meeting space, as well as a regional exemple of a circular approach to architecture and construction. 

At the beginning of 2021, Lille Metropole has also become one of the signatories of the Green City Accord (GCA), which commits cities to step up the city’s efforts in environmental management. This is just another great example in working towards the environmental and climate transition.

Furthermore, on 23 April 2021, the city of Lille adopted its new Master Plan for Household and Assimilar Waste 2021-2030. This plan contains around thirty actions which are organized in 4 different areas: dicarding less, sorting more, offering a better service to the population and modernising the waste treatment. The city’s main ambition is to reduce the amount of waste discarded by its population but also deploy new sorting gestures and modernize the city’s waste treatment facilities to reach laws evolution and to evolve towards the population’s needs.

Since 2021, the city of Lille uses renewable energy through ERDF funded project. This project includes the creation of twenty kilometers of pipelines that circulates hot water from the combustion of household waste. The water is then carried out by one of the waste-to-energy plants. Thanks to this project, the city resulted in a significant decrease in C02 emissions as well as in the energy bill of the metropolitan area.

This system is very effective because the hot water is used to feed the metropolitan heat networks through waste recovery, to heat public facilities such as town halls, swimming pools, and social housing. (photo credit: pch. vector/Freepik)