The PROSPECTS 5.0 project aims to promote the adoption of Industry 5.0 principles, such as human centricity, sustainability, and resiliency, and facilitate the transition to Industry 5.0 for SMEs, start-ups, and scale-ups in various industries. The project intends to achieve its objectives by providing reports, guidelines, measurement tools, and a collaborative platform. To provide real-world examples, the project will analyse 14 use cases from different European Union countries and 6 different industries, covering various types of manufacturing, service providing, education, energy, aviation transport, and automotive. The selected industrial sectors are significant drivers for the adoption of Industry 5.0 and are crucial to the European economy. The use cases from these sectors will ensure a focused and effective transition to Industry 5.0 in Europe. PROSPECTS 5.0 results are expected to encourage collaboration between different entities, including companies, universities, research centres, and government agencies, to co-create new solutions and innovations, improve the skills and mindsets of individuals regarding Industry 5.0, and study pilot projects to test, validate, and measure the impact of Industry 5.0 on various operations, employees, customers, and the environment. Additionally, PROSPECTS 5.0 will raise awareness of Industry 5.0 through workshops, seminars/webinars, and collaborative online platforms and web applications showcasing successful case studies, best practices, challenges, and the latest trends and opportunities of this transition. PROSPECTS5.0 is relevant to the worker Horizon Europe Cluster 4 (Digital, Industry, Space) specifically to destination 6 “A human-centred and ethical development of digital and industrial technologies since the project results will lead to a more inclusive and sustainable EU Industry, and indirectly, the project findings will facilitate the understanding of the required skills needed to support the twin transition.

POLYMERS-5B aims to develop novel alternative biobased polymers synthesized from biobased monomers (diacids, diols, diamines, hydroxyacids, aminoacids, aromatic and phenolic compounds, fatty acids, oils, furans), sourced from underexploited second generation (2G) feedstocks such as agri/food waste (Tomato and Olive wastes) and biomass (wood pulp and lignin derivatives), obeying the food first and cascading principle. The project will resort to Biocatalysis and Green Chemistry processes to generate novel biobased polymers like polyesters and polyamides with pendent functional groups, (e.g., hydroxy, carboxylic, amine, epoxy, thiol, others), polyphenols and poly-furans, that mimic fossil-based polymers properties (e.g., polyethene terephthalate-PET, Polyurethanes-PUs, Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene-ABS, Amine and other polymeric resins), targeting improved biodegradability. These new polymers will be blended to provide valuable bio-composites and polymeric materials for the textile, automotive, furniture and polymeric resin markets. Machine Learning (ML) tools will drive the optimization of the developed technologies towards minimum resource usage “zero waste” and “zero pollution”, while technological, economic, and environmental sustainability aspects will be incorporated early in the design phase by adopting Sustainable by Design (SSbD) approaches. This sustainable strategy will contribute to an increase in the availability of monomers, bio-based polymers & plastic materials synthesized in the EU, that meet the Green Deal targets, reducing the carbon footprint and dependency on fossil-based raw materials and derivatives.

GREEN-LOOP addresses novel bio-based materials solutions, tackling the problem from a circular-business thinking perspective, which will enable overcoming the barrier for new manufacture tools, energy efficiency improvements and sustainable value chains. The main goal of GREEN-LOOP is to design and optimise 3 innovative bio-based materials and components for industrial sectors: construction, packaging, food, beverage, appliances and tooling. 1) multifunctional panels rubber panels with fire resistance and vibrational applications, 2) bioplastic bottle closures for oil and fruit juice, 3) wood composites bearings for plastic injection machines. The value chain of each product is optimised from raw material source to End Of Life of products, ensuring the circular economy. All manufacturing lines are retrofitted to adapt to the new enhanced bio compoundings using Artificial Intelligence. Ultrasound improvement is included in the lignin production and rubber manufacture, and Microwaves improve preheating of bioplastic on injection moulding and curing of wood composites. The whole process is monitored and presented in a virtual platform that includes KPI evaluation, business optimization in real-time, training (webinars), and social engagement

Many different environmental impacts arise from electronics, and the handling of electronic waste (e-waste) is rising quickly to the top of the agenda. E-waste is a significant issue for Europe: Improving its management is an explicit goal of the Green Deal objectives and the Circular Economy Action Plan (3.1. Electronics and ICT). However, due to the requirement to involve the whole value chain, from raw material suppliers to consumers, the complex material background and supply chain, as well as the multitude of competing interests, achieving circularity in the electronics industry is challenging. The main aim of the EECONE project is to reduce e-waste on a European scale. To this end, 54 entities (47 partners, 2 associated partners and 5 affiliated entities) from 16 European countries covering different sectors of activity have joined forces to propose practical ways of reducing the volume of e-waste in the EU. Crucially, the entities that make up EECONE represent all parts of the value chain. EECONE’s approach is interdisciplinary, covering the social, economic, technological, and policy aspects. The environmental impact arising from e-waste can thus be reduced by working in three principal areas: a) Increase service lifetime of electronic products by application of ecodesign guidelines for increasing their reliability and their repair rate, thereby reducing the volume of e-waste. Reduction and replacement of materials to decrease the impact of e-waste. b) Improved circularity by reusing, recycling, and waste valorising materials/elements from electronic products. EECONE’s vision is to develop and embed the constraints linked to managing the end-of-life of electronic products from the very beginning – in the development or process design. EECONE is paving the way as a first step toward a zero-waste electronic industry. The “6R concept will fully guide EECONE” (Reduce, Reliability, Repair, Reuse, Refurbish, Recycle). To deploy its ambitious vision, the EECONE project defines four main objectives: a) Define green. Create clear, simple, open tools to define and design ECS for circularity. Generate, for the first time, a clear framework aiding producers to evaluate their choices and pathways to ecodesign, to foster European leadership in the green transition. b) Make green ECS (Electronic Components Systems): Provide innovative techniques for reducing, repairing, reusing, refurbishing, recycling to decrease e-waste and boost circularity in a new generation of electronics. c) Showcase green solutions: Demonstrate innovation potential, usability, and versatility of the green solution along the value chain. d) Building consciousness: Create an ecosystem empowering the 6R ECS generation. EECONE is a major opportunity to create a European ECOsystem for greeN Electronics and to position Europe as a role model for low environmental impact electronics.

TORNADO will develop an innovative, multifunctional and adaptive cloud robotics platform, supporting advanced navigation of an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) within complex, time-varying, real-world, human-populated indoor environments. The TORNADO AMR will be able to manipulate small, soft or deformable objects (SSDs) to an unprecedented degree of success, as well as to naturally interact with humans via hand gestures or verbal conversation, by exploiting the zero-shot generalization abilities of deep neural Foundation Models (FMs) for robotics. The AMR's intelligence will rely on a pool of pretrained cloud-hosted FMs, which shall be further adjusted on-the-fly to the current situation via Out-of-Distribution Detection, Test-Time Adaptation and Few-Shot Adaptation subsystems. These will exploit human feedback if available, but will also support autonomous and dynamic cognitive adaptation. Additionally, the TORNADO system will be able to automatically select and set-up on-the-fly the most suitable combination of FMs and non-neural robotics algorithms during deployment, depending on the current situation. In cases of failure, on-the-fly skill acquisition will be supported via integrated, novel Learning-from-Demonstration methods facilitated by an innovative Augmented Reality (AR) interface and eXplainable AI (XAI) algorithms. The adaptive TORNADO system will allow the robot to perform difficult, non-repetitive manipulation tasks on previously unseen SSDs that may change shape during handling, as well as to flexibly adjust to SSDs of different sizes during operation. Measurement of human trust to interactive robots and human behavioral modeling will aid optimal integration/acceptance of TORNADO into society. Validation will take place at TRL-5 in 3 different industrial Use-Cases: flexible small gears manipulation and deformable ply-sheets handling (gears factory), palliative patient care (hospital) and product quality sampling/waste collection (dairy processing plant).