HOOP! Hub of Circular Cities Boosting Platform is Ready for Kick Off Globally, around 30% of all waste is organic. However, despite its decomposability, much of such waste still ends up in landfills. For cities, as main waste management stakeholders, there are multiple challenges involved, such as finding the right recycling technologies and aligning with other relevant actors in the process. Our newly launched project HOOP, will directly support selected European cities in choosing, financing, and implementing the, for them, most appropriate technologies for recycling biowaste. The project will also support cities in setting up effective processes, including closer stakeholder collaboration or adjusting other parts of the chain, such as collection or sorting systems. HOOP, which stands for Hub of Circular Cities bOOsting Platform to Foster Investments for the Valorisation of Urban Biowaste and Wastewater, is the next step of our SCALIBUR-project and its sister-projects VALUEWASTE and WaytUP. The goal of HOOP is to help unlock bio-based investments and deploy local bio-economies in European cities through a systemic and cross-cutting approach. Lighthouse cities from eight EU countries will act as demonstrators for transferring circular, bio-based economy models throughout Europe. The project will also support creative ideas and initiatives for obtaining high-value products from organic waste and urban waste water. The city of Münster in Germany will be one of the lighthouses, along with the cities Kuopio in Finland, Bergen in Norway, Almere in the Netherlands, Murcia in Spain and with the three regional clusters Lazio in Italy, LIPOR in Portugal and CluBE in Greece. A key feature of the project will be the so-called Biowaste Clubs, located in each of the lighthouse cities. The clubs will be responsible for ensuring that key local stakeholders along the entire biowaste value chain get involved and work together to, for instance, co-design more efficient collection and valorisation of the local organic waste. Various engagement activities will be carried out for this purpose. The consortium includes partners from ten EU Member States. The CSCP is a partner in the 24-member consortium. HOOP will run for four years and is a Horizon 2020 project led by CETENMA in Spain. For further information, please contact Carina Diedrich.