The Regional Activity Center for Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP/RAC), attached to the Waste Agency of Catalonia (ARC), will lead a new European project to support the creation of green and sustainable businesses in the Mediterranean. Its main goal will be catalysing economic, environmental and social impacts from green and circular businesses through capacity building and development of the local, national and regional support ecosystems. RESET (RESults Enabling Transitions: mapping, synthesising and mainstreaming sustainable, green circular business support achievements in the MED region, for replication and policy-making) is an EU-funded project through the ENI CBC MED Programme and will be managed by five partners located in different countries in the North and the South of the Mediterranean Basin.

Besides SCP/RAC, other partners take part of the project such as Beyond (Lebanon), PIN S.c.r.l. Educational and Scientific Services for the University of Florence (Italy), Leaders Organization (Palestine) and INJAZ Tunisia (Tunisia). RESET also has seven partners in countries such as Spain and Greece, including the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) / Mediterranean Action Plan (MAP) of the Barcelona Convention, of which SCP/RAC is a regional activity centre, or the Balmes University Foundation (University of Vic).

RESET is born with the goal of identifying and analysing the most successful practices in the creation of green businesses for its optimization at a local, national and regional level across the Mediterranean. The project will have a duration of 24 months (estimated end on 12/2/2023), during which it will seek to offer support to entrepreneurial ecosystems and initiatives that promote green and circular entrepreneurship, through guiding, training and technical assistance actions. RESET will be promoting the creation of public policies with a series of regional measures for the development of green and circular businesses.

On the one hand, the project will offer impact evaluation tools and will identify good practices of entrepreneurial support. In this regard, it will offer support to and build capacity of EU project stakeholders through 1 capitalisation ‘clinic’, both on a local and regional level. In addition to this, RESET will offer online and face-to-face training to ensure that this knowledge about the best practices in the creation of sustainable businesses reaches the green entrepreneurs.

On the other hand, strategic papers to guide green business development strategies will be developed and a Virtual Community of Practice to gather the relevant stakeholders will be created. Last but not least, there will be an award to showcase the most successful initiatives and businesses created through ENI CBC Med Projects on which RESET will build its capitalisation process.

RESET is an EU-funded project with a total budget of 1€ million, with an EU contribution of 900.000€. In recognition of the Mediterranean accelerating employment and environmental crises, there are various calls for action to create a sustainable and inclusive economy that works for everyone. The transition towards a circular economy offers clear solutions and benefits at a social, economic and environmental level. The project plays a key role in finding and codifying answers and valid solutions for all those actors whose goals are fostering creating of new sustainable and circular business models.