The need to approach climate action, resource efficiency, and circularity performance as integrated, economy-wide, cross-cutting issues is growingly gaining attention in the policy world, stimulating the development of new industrial policies in Europe and worldwide. Currently, however, there is little progress in conceptualising the circular economy and understanding its interactions with climate action. State-of-the-art modelling capacity to capture the interplay of the two agendas and their implications for energy-intensive sectors as well as to represent the European industrys transformation in line with the regions vision for climate neutrality is not yet fully developed. TRANSIENCE will undertake a comprehensive characterisation and assessment of circularity principles and measures vis--vis decarbonisation, by looking at the twin transition of European industries through the lenses of global competitiveness, innovation, and holistic sustainability. It will then produce MIC3, a consistent, fully open-source model ecosystem to assess industrial circularity, decarbonisation, and sustainability. A series of interoperable modules on the socioeconomic, service and product, material, industrial, energy-system, and environmental perspectives of the transformation of European industry will be developed and integrated, building on and opening the code of leading modelling tools. MIC3 will finally be used in extensive scenario modelling to produce diverse pathways toward a material-efficient, circular, climate-neutral, sustainable European industry. Transparency, openness, and knowledge sharing will be promoted, and technical capacities will be developed in four industrial agglomerations in the EU, moving beyond stakeholder consultation, onto model co-development, continuous validation of assumptions, co-creation of scenario modelling, evaluation of the desirability and usability of the developed model and insights, and eventually co-production of science and action.

CIRCULAR FOAM aims at the demonstration of a territorial cross-sectorial systemic solution for the circularity of high performance plastics from diverse applications on the example of rigid polyurethane foams used as insulation in refrigerators and in construction. The waste streams will be upcycled chemically, which means that they will be valorised to become new virgin-equivalent feedstock for the chemical industry to produce new high performance plastics. In this way, it will become possible to replace limited fossil-based resources by the renewable waste-based ones, thus not only reducing waste, but also becoming more sustainable and making a step forward to climate neutrality. The project and the demonstration are targeting a concrete implementation of the solution in question in the selected regions after the project and developing a blueprint for both the geographical transferability to other regions and for the technological extension of the circularity principle to a number of further waste materials from further applications. We consider here two carefully selected regions: NRW/Germany, Silesia/PL and Greater Amstedam Region. The consortium is composed of all actors required to close the circular value chain (process industries, manufacturing, waste management, technology providers, incl. also research partners, logistics, social scientists and economist working with with public sector and citizens. After practical implementation and replication in EU of the systemic solution, following reductions will have been attained by 2040: 586.000 tons per year less waste, 18,6 mln. tons less CO2 emission; 118 mln EUR less cost for incineration for the PU producers. The system will signifficantly contribute to resilience in regions.