Port accessThe Port of Bilbao has joined the Basque Ecodesign Center, the public-private partnership between the Basque Government and leading companies of the Basque Country to generate advanced knowledge and its transfer to the rest of the business fabric of the Basque Country, and to drive the value chain towards a more circular economy.
The membership of the Basque Ecodesign Center (BEdC), a stable initiative set up in 2011, now consists of twenty leading Basque companies, supported by Ihobe and Spri as driver organisations. During 2024, 6 focus groups made up of the BEdC member companies have worked on as many areas: physical climate risks; risks of transition to a circular economy; taxonomy for sustainable finances; assessment of aspects of the circular economy, such as reparability, recyclability and durability; systematisation of environmental information; and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. The goal of the working groups is to develop and pilot tools that may be used by the business fabric of the Basque Country.
The BEdC has also developed a series of tools in 2024. One such example is the Climate & Circularity Calculator, a free software tool for simplified assessment of the environmental performance of organisations, products and services, with an integrated life cycle approach. The tool has a database of over 250 environmental aspects, adapted to the context of the Basque Country, and which will be progressively increased in number. To date, 351 Basque organisations have signed up and are using the tool, which will be the leading instrument of the Basque Register of Energy Transition and Climate Change Initiatives to calculate carbon footprint.
Using the knowledge generated by the BEdC, 6 technical manuals have also been prepared on areas of interest for companies, such as environmental metrics and their integration, servitization, circular ecodesign, and the different transparency mechanisms that organisations must or can use.
Another activity area of the BEdC is the provision of training for young professionals in the circular skills that companies require. In 2024, 4 training programmes aligned to BEdC priorities were run for 59 young people, 21 of whom completed an internship period at the BEdC itself. A training programme for working professionals was also launched, in conjunction with Confebask and its regional delegations, on the emerging levers for the climate-environmental transition. Between January and October 2024, 36 in-person training courses, attended by 695 professionals, were run.
