GEORGIA (Green dEal cOmpliant iRriGation Increasing Europe’s Agriculture resilience to drought) consortium, consisting of 16 partners from 9 European countries and led by Synelixis SA (the provider of SynField smart agriculture platform), has joined forces to increasing the resilience of agriculture to drought enhancing efficiency in water management. The project assesses drivers and barriers of key innovative irrigation systems, including environmentally responsible recycling of sewage sludge and biowaste streams, biological water-absorbing geocomposites, as well as water abundance and scarcity solutions. In parallel, GEORGIA pursues their optimal application through local condition modeling and employment of Artificial Intelligence. To this end, the partners develop in-situ, drone-based and geospatial monitoring, an eXplainable-AI decision support system as well as Crop Digital Twins. GEORGIA enhances and validates these technologies starting from the farm level and upscaling at large-scale and catchment levels. The socio-techno-economic approach is validated in 7 pilots in 6 countries, connected through a Federated Deep Machine Learning architecture. GEORGIA covers multiple crops, production types (conventional, intensive, agroecology and organic) and geographical regions, namely a) Mediterranean (Greece, Cyprus), b) Southeast Europe-Balkans (Bulgaria, Serbia) c) Central Europe-Midland (Austria), and d) Continental Europe-Baltic Sea (Poland). We will be able to collect and process sensor data from farms that span from the Southern to Northeast Europe, along with organic and non-organic production. We will also have access to large facilities such as Biological Cleaning Plant at BSL 3 covering large private farms, a Greek island (Santorini) and a Greek Region. More than 1,200 farmers will be directly involved in the experimentation phase, providing insights and feedback on AgriDataSpace platform and knowledge provided and more than 89,000 farmers will be dire

European process industries face significant challenges in a changing geopolitical landscape, under the threat of climate change and against fierce international competition. In this context, boosting the resilience and competitiveness of process industries, while taking surefooted steps towards climate neutrality is of existential importance. StreamSTEP is the vision of 31 organisations across EU, Switzerland, Norway and UK, aspiring to trigger significant improvements of how heating energy is managed within industrial processes. The project will address processes that generate waste heat across all temperature grades, from 135oC to over 1400oC, deploying five innovative heat exchanger prototypes for challenging applications and achieving flexible operation across multiple heat sinks. Heat upgrade will be managed through high temperature heat pumps, achieving outlet temperatures at 150oC and at 215oC, with improved performance through ejector technology and the capacity to operate dynamically across a range of required temperatures. Enablers of these innovations are advanced manufacturing techniques, achieving superior material performance through novel material alloys. The system will be demonstrated across five sectors: non-ferrous metals, ceramics, minerals, plastics and refining. The demonstrators will be supported by impact boosting resources, de-risking the investment and accelerating commercialisation. A holistic process digital twinning pipeline will be integral to these advancements, as it will provide the infrastructure to deploy powerful optimisation agents, addressing energy balance, intermediary storage, GHG avoidance and data-driven LCA. The effects of the StreamSTEP project will be significant, as the recovery and efficient reutilisation of the majority of waste heat (50%-over 90%) will be achieved, with systems boasting a payback below 3 years, with the added effects of increasing productivity in selected processes, as well as energy flexibility.

The DATA4CIRC project aims to enhance circularity within the manufacturing sector to facilitate decarbonisation whilst improving competitiveness and boosting the adoption of R-strategies. These objectives will be achieved by providing the sector with the proposed DATA4CIRC solution, a human-centred collaborative digital framework that leverages the power of data and cutting-edge digital technologies for assets digitalisation. This framework will comprise (A) Federated Data Spaces, (B) Digital Models of the circular value chains and products; (C) Digital Product Passport (DPP); and (D) an AI-assisted end-to-end LCA tool. The integration of these tools into a single framework will improve data interoperability and accessibility, therefore boosting the collaboration and the establishment of circular value chains. To do so, (E) ontologies and semantic models will be leveraged and proper user-friendly interfaces will be developed. Furthermore, the DATA4CIRC solutions will be based on existing standards and architectures to maximise their adoption and impact. Special focus will be placed on social aspects for the transition to circular business models which prioritise the needs, expectations and experiences of end-users. By embracing the social innovation paradigm, human involvement throughout the project is boosted through co-creation and co-validation activities. Moreover, an upskilling and reskilling training programme will be designed and conducted to facilitate the uptake of digital tools in the manufacturing workforce during the project and beyond its completion. Validation and demonstration of the DATA4CIRC solution will be achieved via three use cases, thereby consolidating successful progress from TRL4 to TRL6. The selected use cases are circular value chains in manufacturing sectors with high impact potential and significant room for improvement regarding the field of circular economy: the electronics, plastics, and automotive sectors.