Client: Municipality of Amersfoort
Date: March – October 2025
Location: Amersfoort, Netherlands
The Municipality of Amersfoort has ambitious plans to become one of Europe’s circular economy leaders and trailblazers. Its goal is to be completely waste-free by 2050. While the municipality does not yet have a dedicated sharing economy strategy, it sees the sharing economy as an important way to achieve its circular economy objectives, while also supporting social cohesion and healthy urban living.
To advance these ambitions, Amersfoort is piloting the “sharing station” concept and has partnered with Bax Innovation to support the project’s design and rollout.
Are you interested in deploying sharing stations within your city? Get in touch with us.
Challenge
Sharing stations are a new concept: self-service lockers where residents can borrow a variety of items, such as tools, household appliances, and sports equipment, for short periods of time. Most municipalities have limited experience with sharing stations. This includes understanding viable business and operating models, selecting suitable locations, and working effectively with infrastructure providers and operators. At the start of the project, there were no known examples of municipalities who had already deployed their own sharing stations, meaning Amersfoort had no municipal examples to follow and learn from.
Approach
To support the Municipality of Amersfoort, Bax carried out the following activities:
- Training the municipal team on sharing-station business and operating models
- Facilitating ideation sessions to define use cases and assess potential locations
- Supporting outreach to secure host sites (including libraries and second-hand shops)
- Interviewing infrastructure providers to align on budget, technology requirements, and key features
- Engaging potential operators through stakeholder interviews
- Developing the project budget
- Drafting procurement documents for both the infrastructure and operational services
Impact
