Community Circular Hub Guide
An initiative of Green Industries SA, developed by Rawtec. Intended for developers, councils and planners.
Summary published
The problem this guide starts from is not waste. It is ownership. The average power drill is used for 13 minutes in its entire life. The average Australian wears half the clothes in their wardrobe. Households throw out about $3,000 of food a year.
A Community Circular Hub is the physical answer: one place where a neighbourhood can borrow, swap, repair, donate and learn instead of buying and discarding. The guide’s contribution is to define that at three concrete scales, with the floor area each one needs.
It also sets the stakes properly. 45% of the greenhouse gas reductions the world needs have to come from changing how products, materials and food are designed, produced and used — not from energy.
Neighbourhood Hub
Council or city-wide Hub
Mega Hub
Of needed emissions cuts that must come from circularity
The three scales, and what each looks like in practice
Neighbourhood: a library of things, run by subscription
At 25 to 100 square metres this is a storage and booking operation. Sweden’s Ihopa runs app-booked boxes — a Neighbourhood Box of about 30 items up to a City Box of 50 or more products, holding projectors, bread machines, sewing machines, drills, circular saws, leaf blowers, steam cleaners and bike repair kits. Some municipalities pay the subscription for residents.
Council or city-wide: a recycling centre that is also a social facility
At 600 to 2,000 square metres, Copenhagen’s Nordhavn site is pedestrian and cyclist only. It combines a 12-category recycling wall, a swap shelf, a volunteer repair workshop, a second-hand book library, hazardous waste drop-off and cargo-bike lending, around a workshop with somewhere to sit.
The building can be the demonstration
Nordhavn was “built with 90% upcycled materials, including old windows and doorframes”. The facility argues for circularity by being made of it.
Mega: a reuse mall that turns a profit and employs people
ReTuna in Eskilstuna opened in 2015 and draws over 700 shoppers a day. In 2018 it generated SEK 11.7 million — about AUD 1.6 million — in sales and “created 50 jobs in a city with high unemployment”.
ReTuna's layout forces donation before consumption
The public must pass through the “Returnen” donation centre to reach the rest of the mall. Donated stock is then supplied to the tenant shops at no charge — which is what makes the retail model work.
Education is treated as Hub infrastructure
ReTuna runs a year-long “Recycle Design Recycling” vocational course with Eskilstuna Folkhögskola and supplies craft materials to a partner preschool. Not an add-on programme — part of the facility.
The five design principles
A suite of services in one location, open weekdays and weekends, wheelchair accessible, well served by transport. The guide puts this first.
Services matched to what the community actually needs, established through market research, needs analysis and community feedback rather than assumption.
“Welcoming to people of all ages, genders, and backgrounds.” A Hub that reads as being for one demographic will only serve that one.
Partner with what is already running rather than duplicating it. The repair café and the op shop are collaborators, not competitors.
The space has to be somewhere people want to spend time, and comfortable in the local climate, or the rest of the design does not matter.
The guide is written for the South Australian context and its three case studies are all European — there are no Australian precedents in it, no operational manual, no financial model and no local cost benchmarks. It is a concept and feasibility document for the front of a project. Rawtec’s standard note applies: the information “is based upon sources, experimentation and methodology which at the time of preparing this document were believed to be reasonably reliable”.
Related work
Other circular economy and better practice guidance.
The full guide includes the six-step development process, the policy alignment section and the three case studies in detail.
Working on something like this?
Most of our projects start with someone inside an organisation who already knows what needs to change and needs the evidence to back it in. If that is you, we would like to hear from you.