Packaging is a growing source of waste and consumer frustration. Today, 40% of the overall EU demand for plastics is for packaging. The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation requires all packaging to be recyclable by 2030, and calls for high quality recycling where secondary raw material (SRM) must be of sufficient quality to substitute Primary Raw Material (PRM) for similar applications. As of today, such high-quality recycling is particularly challenging for plastic contact sensitive packaging (CSP), such as polyolefin (PO) CSP which are downcycled to applications of lower value. MERKATO aims to develop a mechanical recycling solution for the high quality recycling of PO CSP (single use, reusable, mono-material, multilayers, rigid, flexible) to build an internal EU market where SRM supply (waste management companies, recyclers) can meet the demand of the packaging industry (manufacturers, brand owners) and enable the deployment of policy-makers legislations. The 4-years project implementation will start by the validation of synergies between AI, de-inking and scCO2 to reach regulatory decontamination levels. The project will develop a fully new solution able to differentiate SRM from PRM, and certify the percentage of SRM integrated into a new product. To ensure the acceptance of our solutions by value chain actors and consumers, we will asses and optimize the socio-economic value of our solutions by performing LCA, LCCA and sLCA. Finally, MERKATO will demonstrate at TRL8 (5 tons scale) its solutions. To further boost the market for recyled PO CSP, MERKATO will also upcycle them into SRM meeting technical specifications of high added value products from other sectors (automative, sport/leisure, EEE). Thanks to this new methodology, MERKATO will develop a new value chain using recycled resources for single use and reusable CSP, enable upcycling, increase the circularity of the overall plastic CSP waste stream from 21% to 78%, reduce CO2 emissions by 2.7 Mt/y.

The demand for composite materials in aerospace is increasing, mainly due to their high strength to weight ratio which will lead to lighter structures and fuel saving. Increased usage of thermosets, the main composite used in aerospace, raises new concerns about their end of life and environmental impact associated with long time-consuming and high cost intensive processes. For example, thermoset fuselage skins are mainly produced by gantry-mounted advanced fiber placement (AFP) machines and co-curing of stringers in a subsequent autoclave cycle. This increase the high cost already enhance by the production of carbon fiber material. To be able to compete with metal based, an alternative production process for structural parts of aircrafts could be demonstrated using the advantages of thermoplastics. Composite thermoplastic materials provide an interesting alternative to thermoset composite materials. They are thus adequate candidates against the current issues of relief and sustainable development especially in the field of transportation, energy, and construction. MAYA project main objective is to develop innovative manufacturing routes integrating standard thermoplastic processes (injection moulding and thermoforming) combined with additive manufacturing to realize lining panels of fuselage to decrease the production time, reduce weight, optimize costs and enhance the part performances using thermoplastic materials. The high productivity rate of thermoplastic injection moulding associated to the design freedom of 3D printing will lead to an overall enhancement of the panels performances and manufacturing. MAYA will have direct impact on European aerospace industries through achieving its goals. The actives have been carefully planned in seven workpackages in duration of 24 months to ensure that maximum impact in terms of manufacturing and assembly cost and time, environmental carbon foot print, etc will be delivered to European aerospace industries.

The European moulded fibre products (MFP) manufacturing sector has global technology leadership. Job creation and sustainable growth in this sector contributes to the Green, Circularity and Digital Transition of the European economy. To succeed on the ambitious objectives set in the European Green Deal, the European natural fibre material (NFM) processing industry and the European moulded fibre products manufacturing industry must have access to a new generation of innovative, entrepreneurial, highly skilled research-oriented cross-disciplinary engineers. The ENDURE doctoral network aims to train 12 Doctoral Candidates on cross-disciplinary topics of: (i) natural fiber-based materials engineering; (ii) product design and production engineering with fiber-based materials; (iii) digital manufacturing technologies and Industry 4.0 for the natural fiber industry. The eventual hybrid cross-disciplinary profiles of the DCs of ENDURE are currently extremely rare or not available as existing doctoral programmes in EU focus only on the individual aspects. Manufacturing firms dealing with the fibre materials thus currently suffer the lack of skilled personnel. A detailed understanding of the behaviour of new NFMs in production and design implications for MFPs will be developed within ENDURE. The project will foster innovations in NFM processing (using agricultural wastes, short fiber sources like eucalyptus, and recycled MFPs), in design and assembly of new production equipment for MFPs, in modelling solutions (both multiphysics and AI/ML based) for optimizing production, and deployment of sensors and digital twins. The methods will be used for demonstrator MFP production across five industry sectors. Successful completion of ENDURE will (i) expand the use of fibre-based materials from 2D packaging to 3D products; (ii) adopt the relevant digital technologies for the engineering of natural fibre-based products; (iii) digitalize the fibre-based materials moulding processes.

MATVIT gathers a multidisciplinary consortium involving recognized researchers in the field of vitrimers (IMP and MMC) and the French technical center on plastics and composites (IPC). We propose two ground-breaking concepts to solve some technological locks preventing their widespread use and to widen their scope of application. The first concept consists in synthesizing polymer alloys by thoughtful and innovative combinations of vitrimer materials: i) dual vitrimers involving two orthogonal exchange reactions in the same network, thus affording materials with widely tunable temperature-dependent viscosity profiles. ii) vitrimer-based interpenetrating networks (VIPN) that can be reprocessed, consisting of two independent networks: a high Tg, slightly cross-linked covalent network and a dynamic vitrimer network. iii) dynamic thermoplastic vitrimer vulcanizates (TPV²) resulting from the dispersion of a vitrimer phase into a minor continuous thermoplastic matrix. The second concept consists in developing “pre-stressed vitrimer composites” from long fibers and high Tg vitrimer matrices. Careful choice of components and application of temperature and stress profiles will enable to prepare materials with embedded compressive stresses with enhanced mechanical strength. The main objectives of the MATVIT project are: • To develop a new generation of vitrimer materials able to be reprocessed by injection or extrusion with higher throughput and offering better properties than current thermoset and thermoplastic materials. • To understand the properties of vitrimers based on in-depth structural and mechanical characterizations. • To demonstrate all the potential of vitrimer materials in key industrial applications using state-of-the-art processing techniques. • To analyze innovation needs from the final market perspective, define the corresponding properties required from vitrimers, and propose appropriate solutions. The four independent and groundbreaking approaches described above will help answering the industrial needs for reshapable, weldable and reprocessable high performance TSs. • To disseminate the scientific results in scientific journals and conference and to promote vitrimer materials toward industrial partners (SMEs, large industrial groups and European technical centers) in order to make the outcome of MATVIT project sustainable.

Electronics today cause major environmental impacts through manufacture, use and disposal, as well as growing concerns about Europe's economic and technological dependence on other regions of the world. The overall objective of GreenOMorph is the radical reduction of the environmental impact of electronics manufacture, use and end-of-life as well as a total avoidance of critical raw materials in manufactured devices. We attack this goal on the one hand by choosing neuromorphic instead of common Von Neumann computing reducing the energy consumed during use by several orders of magnitude. On the other hand, we completely rely on organic electronics with innovative green materials and additive low-temperature manufacturing by blade coating, screen-printing and inkjet printing, in all parts of an organic artificial sensory neuron for recognition of tactile pressure patterns. The parts of the neuron, as there are an organic tactile sensor, organic signal conditioning circuits and organic artificial synapses, as well as the neuron itself are validated outcomes of the project and contribute to the project portfolio of Responsible Electronics already during their development. The outcomes of the project will help to replace a performance-at-any-cost attitude, yet staying fully aware that developing non-performing devices not accepted by users would have a great environmental impact as well; so performance targets and market analysis are equally important as the low environmental impact targets and social life cycle assessment are. Showing that it is possible to fulfil a given purpose at an environmental footprint orders of magnitude smaller than today, and at the same time reduce dependence on other regions of the world, our low-environmental-footprint-first approach will serve as a reference in the future, from scientific communities to technology developers and manufacturers through to the end users.