Since January 2024, ten organisations in four European countries have been working on the following question: If Europe is serious about circular economy, who is actually going to teach people how to run one? Become, short for Boosting Circular Economy Expertise through learning communities, is a project that was designed to do just this. Co-funded by Erasmus , it runs until mid-2027, bringing together four universities, two vocational colleges and four employers from across Finland, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Bulgaria.

The consortium first mapped existing and missing circular skills in its four regions. The gap analysis that was carried out was then backed up by the development of modular training materials and a training week in Bled (Slovenia) in May 2025 for around thirty educators, followed by a second week for twenty company practitioners in March 2026. Circular hubs and local learning communities are also operating in all four countries.

The number that should alert us

Eurostat reported that 12.2% of the materials used in the EU in 2024 came from recycled sources. The 2020 Circular Economy Action Plan promised to double that share by 2030, an ambition the Clean Industrial Deal now sets at 24%. The European Environment Agency has done the arithmetic: hitting it would require more than 1.7 percentage points of progress every year, more than Europe managed in total between 2010 and 2024.

The Circularity Gap Report 2026 from Circle Economy and Deloitte, counts money rather than tonnes: €25.4 trillion of avoidable value lost every year to linear material use. For every €3 created worldwide, around €1 is lost.

What Europe’s governments have actually promised

Nearly every member state has a plan: the European Environment Agency counts 20 out of 27 with a national strategy or action plan. Despite circular efforts across the EU, the European Court of Auditors still concluded in 2023 that the transition was “slow”.

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