In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, the adoption of circular practices is essential for small tourism companies striving for sustainability and growth. While the concept of circularity may seem complex, particularly for businesses not initially set up as circular companies, we can use the practical approach known as the Bottom-Up method. This approach involves implementing small-scale circular projects within the business, gradually shifting the focus towards circularity and fostering sustainable business growth.
This submodule serves as a guide for small tourism companies embarking on their circular journey, focusing on learning the essential skills necessary for running an effective circular business. By starting with tangible projects and initiatives, companies can progressively build momentum towards becoming fully circular.
Deep Dive into Key Topics
The Submodule Consists of Three Sections:
1. Identification and Selection of Circular Skills:
○ This section explores the diverse array of "Green" or "Circular" skills essential for navigating the circular economy landscape. Drawing from frameworks such as the EU Green Comp framework and the insights from the Kalmykova et al. report, we look at how we selected and categorised of these skills,
2. C-Tour Skill Survey:
○ Here, we examine the findings of the C-Tour Skill Survey conducted with small tourism companies. Through this survey, we assess the perceived importance of Circular skills among businesses and evaluate their proficiency in mastering them.
3. Integration of Circular Skills into Business Design:
○ This section showcases how Circular skills can be integrated into the design and implementation of concrete circular projects. Through examples from the C-Tour Database, learners will understand how these skills can be applied in real-world scenarios to drive sustainable practices and foster circularity. Practical examples and case studies will highlight successful implementations, providing inspiration and guidance for businesses embarking on their circular journey.
Through this submodule, learners will acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to effectively implement circular practices in their small tourism businesses, setting them on the path towards sustainable success.
1.1. Identification and Selection of Circular Skills:
Our project embraces a Bottom-Up approach to promoting circularity within the tourism sector, distinguishing itself from the traditional Top-Down methods. While the Top-Down approach typically involves entrepreneurs starting with a circular mindset or designing circular business models from the outset, our focus is on empowering businesses to identify and implement concrete circular practices within their existing operations.
In our Bottom-Up approach, we look at actions and initiatives that promote circularity, using the ReSOLVE Framework to guide our efforts. This approach emphasises the integration of circular practices into a company's processes, aligning value creation with market demands and fostering direct and immediate circular results.
Businesses can evolve their business models to embrace circular principles at any stage of their journey, as demonstrated by the LiveCircularCanvas European Project.
In this project, we target small tourism companies with fewer than 50 employees, excluding larger hotel chains, to maintain a focus on businesses operating on a smaller scale. These companies are the primary beneficiaries of our efforts, and we feature them prominently in our case stories.
We have sought out companies with experience in implementing circular projects, even if they do not explicitly identify as "Circular Economic companies." These projects demonstrate tangible circular aspects, such as recycling used materials or optimising production processes, aligning with circular strategies and they can be studied in the C-Tour Database.
Additionally, the case companies are involved in tourism services, such as hospitality services like BnBs, hotels, and restaurants, as well as mobility services such as guided tours, bike rentals, and travel agencies. These companies play a vital role in shaping the sustainability of the tourism sector and serve as excellent examples for our project.
For the selection of circular skills relevant to the small tourism sector, the C-Tour project draws upon two primary sources: the report "Circular economy – From review of theories and practices to development of implementation tools" by Yuliya Kalmykova, Madumita Sadagop, and Leonardo Rosado, and the European sustainability competence framework, GreenComp.
Kalmykova et. al.
The Kalmykova report provides a comprehensive overview of circular economy theories and practices, offering a range of strategies for implementation. These strategies are organised according to the ReSolve categories of circular practices: Regenerate, Share, Optimise, Loop, Virtualise, and Exchange. The C-Tour project adapts and refines these strategies to isolate the skills most relevant to the small tourism sector, ensuring a tailored approach that addresses the unique challenges and opportunities within this industry.
Based on this report the partnership has constructed the C-Tour ReSOLVE Database, which encompasses 28 specific circular strategies combined with examples of concrete actions and the skills required for their implementation.
Within the C-Tour ReSOLVE Database, each circular strategy is detailed, providing insights into how businesses can effectively incorporate circular practices into their operations. These strategies cover a wide range of areas, including resource regeneration, sharing economies, optimization of processes, closed-loop systems, virtualization, and material exchange. Accompanying each strategy are examples of tangible actions that businesses can undertake to embrace circularity, along with the skills necessary to execute these actions successfully.
GreenComp
In addition to the insights gleaned from the Kalmykova report, our project also draws from the GreenComp framework to select key skills essential for promoting circularity within the small tourism sector. Specifically, we have identified skills related to Exploratory Thinking, Collective Action, and Individual Initiative as particularly relevant. These skills are focused on concrete action, emphasising the importance of actively implementing circular economy principles rather than merely conceptualising them.
By combining the insights from the ReSOLVE Database and the selected skills from the GreenComp framework, our project aims to provide small tourism businesses with a comprehensive understanding of the concrete actions and skills needed to embrace circularity effectively.
1.2. C-Tour Skill Survey
The C-Tour skill survey was conducted as part of comprehensive interviews with the owners of 20 small tourism companies, aiming to assess their proficiency and perceived importance of specific circular skills. The survey questions were categorised into four themes: Exploratory Thinking, Collective Action, Individual Initiative, and Circular Project Implementation.
The first three themes, Exploratory Thinking, Collective Action, and Individual Initiative, are derived from the European GreenComp Framework, focusing on the relational way of thinking, collaboration for change, and personal contribution to sustainability, respectively. The fourth theme, Circular Project Implementation, features the skills compiled in the C-tour Resolve Database that takes its inspiration from the report "Circular Economy – From Review of Theories and Practices to Development of Implementation Tools" by Kalmykova et al., encompassing projects aligned with circular economy principles.Respondents were asked to rate various statements on a Likert scale from 1 to 4, evaluating both their mastery of the skills and the importance of these skills within their businesses. Each respondent's answers were indexed to reflect the average score on the questions they answered, facilitating comparisons across companies and countries. However, caution is advised when interpreting these scores, as there were some unanswered questions, and each respondent answered from a personal perspective without baseline references.
Despite this caveat, the survey provides valuable insights into the proficiency and importance of circular skills among small tourism companies. By analysing the aggregated scores for each theme and country, we can identify trends and areas for improvement, informing targeted interventions and initiatives to enhance circularity within the tourism sector.
Survey Results
The survey findings indicate that the four thematic areas investigated - Exploratory Thinking, Collective Action, Individual Initiative, and Circular Project Implementation - are generally rated high in both mastery and importance among small tourism companies. This suggests that the selected skills align well with practical applications in real-world settings.
However, there are slight variations in how these skills are perceived by respondents. Exploratory Thinking skills received high average ratings overall, but some respondents, particularly those in food production and service businesses like Pont Sec in Spain, Bread 41 in Ireland, and Järvsö Creperie in Sweden, rated them lower. This discrepancy may be attributed to the nature of their operations, which prioritise sustainable practices and circular projects over exploratory thinking.
Collective Action skills, while rated slightly lower on average, remain important, albeit to a lesser extent for some respondents. Challenges may arise in applying these skills to day-to-day business operations due to their abstract nature.
In contrast, Individual Initiative skills are highly relevant to most respondents, with business owners envisioning themselves in line with these skills.
The implementation skills, though diverse, are not universally applicable to all businesses. Nonetheless, most skills are rated highly, indicating their relevance to small tourism companies focusing on sustainability and circular practices.
Overall, the survey underscores the importance of mastering these skills for small tourism businesses and highlights their alignment with practical day-to-day operations in the pursuit of sustainability and circularity.
You can find the C-Tour Survey analysis report here.
1.3. Integration of Circular Skills into Business Design
This section shows how Circular skills can be integrated into the design and implementation of concrete circular projects within small tourism businesses. Through examples from the C-Tour Database, you will understand how these skills can be applied in real-world scenarios to drive sustainable practices and foster circularity. Practical examples and case studies will highlight successful implementations, providing inspiration and guidance for businesses embarking on their circular journey.
The most intuitive way of learning about the many different types of circularity that can be considered in the tourism business is to look through the C-Tour Database. https://c-tour.eu/en/learning-platform/modules
If you narrow your search to the Circular strategies you can find the different projects within each Resolve category:
To recapitulate the Resolve categories as they have been presented in Module 2:
Regenerate - Shift to renewable energies; reclaim, retain and restore health of ecosystems and return recovered biological resources to the biosphere.Share - Peer-to-peer sharing of privately owned products or public sharing of pools of products. Examples include car- and home-sharing business models. Open space office sharing.
Optimise - Increase efficiency of product and remove waste production in the supply chain. Leverage big data automation, and remote sensing. None of these actions requires changing products or technologies.
Loop - Keep closed production cycles through remanufacturing and recycling. Digest anaerobically. Extract biochemicals from organic waste. For renewable materials, it involves anaerobic digestion and the extraction of biochemicals from organic waste.
Virtualise - Deliver utility virtually-books or music, online shopping, fleets of autonomous vehicles, and virtual offices.
Exchange - Replace old materials with more advanced ones that incorporate these precepts in their design and apply new technologies eg.3D printing, products and efficient services.
Most of the circular projects in the C-Tour database are in the Regenerate, the Optimise, and the Loop categories.
For a small tourism business is it easier to become circular by upgrading to renewable energy sources or conducting proper waste management. This would be considered regeneration. The next step could be to use pre-loved and refurbished furniture and decor. The evolution from there could be to use pre-used items as the main basis for the service. This would be considered a loop project. Moving on from there, a small business could start a process of optimising its service production, using fewer resources to do more, or even use technology and online tools to enhance and broaden the scope to the consumer base. This would be considered virtualisation. If a tourism business would implement a sharing project it would probably be as the main service and business model. Refurbish Bike and MyRentGo are examples of these types of businesses in the database. The last category: Exchange is more connected to production companies rather than service providers. This is why we don’t find any circular projects in this category in the C-tour database.
Watch the Digital story from Himmelbjerggaarden to see a combination of many different circular skills being put into practice.
Interactive exercises/reflective questions
Exercise: Multiple choice
Exercise: Multiple choice
Exercise: Drag & Drop
Further resources: videos and/or useful links
C-Tour Survey analysis report
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MLADad8QVSqrMnS8g0mYWtpSxSNrwFKn/view?usp=drive_link
C-tour Resolve Database
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EXUYplj657HrnC4rhJo7IFNyQbsNc5V0/view?usp=drive_link
C-Tour Database of Circular Projects.
https://c-tour.eu/en/learning-platform/modules
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MLADad8QVSqrMnS8g0mYWtpSxSNrwFKn/view?usp=drive_link
C-tour Resolve Database
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EXUYplj657HrnC4rhJo7IFNyQbsNc5V0/view?usp=drive_link
C-Tour Database of Circular Projects.
https://c-tour.eu/en/learning-platform/modules
References
LiveCircularCanvas EU Project
https://livecircularcanvas.eu/
"Circular economy – From review of theories and practices to development of implementation tools" by Yuliya Kalmykova, Madumita Sadagop, and Leonardo Rosado
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921344917303701
European sustainability competence framework, GreenComp
https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/greencomp-european-sustainability-competence-framework_en
https://livecircularcanvas.eu/
"Circular economy – From review of theories and practices to development of implementation tools" by Yuliya Kalmykova, Madumita Sadagop, and Leonardo Rosado
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921344917303701
European sustainability competence framework, GreenComp
https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/greencomp-european-sustainability-competence-framework_en
