Promoting circular economy approaches is critical to decrease the environmental footprint of food production activities. However, there are still inefficiencies at all stages of the food supply chain hindering sustainable food production. In this line, to contribute to sustainability in the last part of the food supply chain, SERENADE proposes a multidisciplinary approach combining three pillars: food, sensors, and materials technologies with the objective of building smart sustainable solutions targeting the reduction of food waste at the end of the food supply chain (households, supermarkets, and food retailers). Thus, SERENADE’s main goal is to develop sustainable innovations for food quality tracking, while training at the same time a new generation of 7 multidisciplinary Doctoral Candidates (DCs) in the fields of food technology, sensor technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and eco-friendly materials (circular economy) and allowing them to work in team with experts in other disciplines. These innovations will result in the development of i) a smart and sustainable food container for monitoring food freshness at households and markets, using sensor technology and made of novel food-grade materials (biobased or recycled) and ii) a handheld food spoilage analyzer combining sensor technology, and artificial intelligence (AI) software to determine food freshness in unpackaged food at markets. To achieve the development of said monitoring solutions, the close collaboration of experts in the three research pillars of the SERENADE project and the training of multidisciplinary researchers in the three fields at the same time, will be needed and will be possible thanks to the international and intersectoral cooperation of the SERENADE partners distributed among 4 EU countries (Spain, Germany, Belgium, and Italy), and to the strong involvement of the industry, with the participation and leadership of industrial partners (SMEs and large industries).

The market conditions and the regulatory framework for the shipping industry and shipyards are changing profoundly. In response, shipyards need to build up the capacity to assess the environmental footprint of their yard-activities and the ship to inform their stakeholders in a transparent, understandable, comprehensive, and trustworthy way. While the environmental footprint of the operational phase of a ship can be covered sufficiently by existing standards, the non-operational footprint of the shipyard processes and the integrated materials and components remain a black box. It is the ambition of this project to drastically change the as-is situation and to make the impact measurable and thereby drive progress toward circular, zero impact shipping over the full circle of life of a ship. Therefore, CirclesOfLife will develop, test, and validate a general methodology and framework applicable to all European shipyards enabling to close the gaps in assessing the environmental performance of the shipyards and the ships they design, build, maintain, retrofit or recycle. CirclesOfLife will go beyond state of the art by defining a scientifically sound SEPI-methodology and Cradle2Cradle Ship Passport and will test and validate its applicability in day-to-day business of shipyards and suppliers in several use-cases, ranging from new building- to repair-and maintenance- to recycling yards. Moreover, CirclesOfLife follows a clear pathway towards market introduction and societal impact supported by Surfrider and ShipBreaking Platform as independent and trustworthy NGO’s. Based on the described measures, CirclesOfLife pursues to offer a widely accepted standard enabling shipyards, maritime equipment manufacturers, shipping companies, finance institutions and other stakeholders to compare the environmental footprint of ships and shipyards