The ReWaCEM project aims at reducing water use, wastewater production, energy use, valuable metal resource recovery and water footprint by between 30-90% in the metal plating, galvanizing and printed circuit board industry. In order to achieve these goals, ReWaCem will adopt two cutting edge membrane technologies suitable for the requirements of closed material cycles approaches and recovery concepts in metal processing industry: Diffusion Dialysis (DD) and Membrane Distillation (MD) as an integrated hybrid process. This combination of existing technologies will be adapted to fit the requirements of 4 pilot demonstration sites in representative industrial applications of the metallurgical industry in order to evaluate the accomplishment of the ReWaCEM goals. Through the evaluation of the demonstration a highly attractive technological solution for low energy wastewater treatment will be available to be entered into the large and growing market of metal processing. This market will profit significantly from the technological outcome of the innovation action, with cost savings and environmental benefits as relevant rewards. In order to maximise impact, the project consortium was selected carefully to represent all relevant stakeholders in the quadrant of end users, scientific partners, associations and decision makers and SMEs. The consortium will establish a dissemination & exploitation board that will create a substantial network of interest groups from agencies, industry, research SMEs and research centres as well as universities. The successful exploitation of the results will lead to a post project up-scaling of the technology and a step by step market introduction. Part of ReWaCEM will be to mobilise all relevant stakeholders into promoting innovative membrane solutions for industrial water and resources management, leading to the effective implementation of European directives and policies while creating market opportunities for European industry and SMEs.

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.

The Chips JU project E2PackMan contributes to strengthen innovation and packaging production in Europe to improve the ecosystem for leading edge / advanced electronics. Integration of more functionality in smaller volume is still the major driver in microelectronics. In order to facilitate further miniaturization, assembly and packaging (A&P) is becoming of increasing importance for the value chain of a microelectronic product. To secure the future of electronic products "Made in Europe", we need a big push to strengthen innovation and production in the A&P sector. Thus E2PackMan will push materials research as well as innovative equipment and process developments. The focus of this research will be on catalyzing industrial production capabilities in Europe, both strengthening the production capabilities of the large semiconductor suppliers in Europe and creating a network that enables SMEs to produce their innovative devices in Europe. A world-class consortium of 60 partners from 13 European countries has been brought together to push advanced packaging in Europe towards heterogeneous system integration: The E2PackMan -EU project tackles a coherent approach that includes the whole value chain from material, process and technology developments validated by test-builds including the interface of the package to the chips and to the board/system.

sustainablySMART will make a change to the life cycle of mobile information and communication devices by developing new product design approaches (including enhanced end-of-life performance, re-use and re-manufacturing aspects; i.e. implementing “Design for a Circular Economy”) for smartphones and tablet computers on the product and printed circuit board level, and by new re-/de-manufacturing processes with improved resource efficiency through (1) enhanced sorting capabilities and speed (optimized sorting efficiency), (2) automated disassembly of mobile IT devices for extraction of reusable components / modules, better material separation and depollution of end-of-life devices (increase value creation out of discarded devices significantly to create an economic advantage over shredding processes), and (3) high-quality performance testing (batteries) and rework (semiconductors and modules) of reusable components/modules (creating a market push for reusable parts through enhanced availability for repair and cascade reuse)

The challenges and major HiCONNECTS objectives are to transform the centralized cloud platform to decentralized platforms which include edge cloud computing in a sustainable, energy-efficient way. This will bring cloud services including Artificial Intelligence (AI) closer to the IOT end-users, which enables them to really use the COT and IOT efficiently. The technologies underpinning this revolutionary step include the development of high-performance computing, storage infrastructure, network interfaces and connecting media , and the analysis of IOT sensors and big data in real-time. This major step forward will enable, for example, the mobile clients (during the 5G deployment phase and 6G exploration) to move among different places with minimum cost, short response time and with stable connection between cloud nodes and mobile devices. The main underlying technology to be developed by the HiCONNECTS consortium, comprising large industrial players, universities and RTO’s, and many SMEs, can be summarized under the title: ’heterogenous integration’ (HI) which is needed to meet the computing power, bandwidth, latency and sensing requirements for the next generation cloud and edge computing and applications. The HI revolution brings the electronic components and systems (ECS) into a new domain, which combines traditional silicon wafers integrated circuit (IC), InP based high speed electronics , and Si and InP photonics devices and interconnect. The HiCONNECTS ambition is to demonstrate, through HI development, a leap in computing and networking reliability and performances across the full vertical and horizontal ECS value chain (i.e. essential capabilities and key applications) in a sustainable way. In addition, HiCONNECTS will focus on the development of next generation design, algorithms, equipment (HW/SW), systems and Systems of Systems (SOS).