Industrial symbiosis promotes sharing of physical resources (energy, water, residues and recycled materials, etc.) between different industrial processes, increasing business opportunities and creating new jobs while reducing environmental impacts. Neither self-organization nor the few government co-ordinated mechanisms have delivered mass implementation of Industrial Symbiosis. Given the great potential for triple-bottom line benefits this failure must be understood and addressed. SCALER aims to massively increase the implementation of industrial symbiosis, by developing mechanisms to retain the embedded value of European resources, thus, enabling the circular economy to achieve higher resource efficiency through systemic innovations led by intensified industrial symbiosis initiatives and enhanced by cross-sectorial collaboration and, to support the development of a roadmap to improve the adoption of industrial symbiosis in the European process industry at regional / national / European level. SCALER will use new and advanced practices in identifying value opportunities, use new methods to create a larger market for available resources, and use new methods to measure and manage the implementation and sustaining of new relationships. SCALER brings together qualitative and quantitative tools and methods to support self-organised initiatives on industrial symbiosis and to enhance facilitation processes and coordination actions. The creation of new spaces for interaction, collaboration and cooperation and the engagement of a broader set of stakeholders are crucial elements of the multiplier effect in industrial symbiosis implementation. SCALER provides a comprehensive solution for understanding, assessing and intensifying the potential of industrial symbiosis in Europe.

Hubs for Circularity (H4C) are to be the European lighthouses of resource efficiency: through implementing best practice in industrial and urban symbiosis (I-US), the H4C are intended to achieve a step change in circular utilisation of resources and GHG emission reductions within given geographic areas. The European Community of Practice (ECoP) builds on and brings together ongoing work and expertise on H4C and I-US, initially supporting the H4C demonstrations funded under Horizon Europe. This project will develop both the ECoP network of stakeholders (commencing with funded H4C demo projects) together with an information and knowledge platform to enable stakeholders to take action. By creating awareness and fostering knowledge sharing between regions/cities and their industries, the H4C Platform will provide the tools and the evidence base for the approach to be adopted widely across Europe. A sustainable business model for deployment of the toolkit and services developed under the project will ensure the H4C ECoP is maintained well into the future. This consortium led by ISQ not only includes world leaders in the field (experienced in delivery, training, stakeholder engagement, models and methodologies) but also has the specific committed support and participation of many of the European bodies (those representing regions, cities, industry, educational institutions etc) that are needed to both disseminate the project outcomes and initiate implementation. Working closely with its sister consortium H4C-Europe, the H4C ECoP consortium is confident of delivering an ECoP and H4C platform that will achieve the target of greater circularity and carbon neutrality through profitable actions that also benefit communities/civil society.

The amount of freshwater available has drastically decreased due to rapid population growth, industrialization, and recurring dry extremes. Merely 3% of freshwater makes up all of Earth's water resources, with saline water making up the other 97%. One-fifth of the world's population, according to the World Health Organization, resides in nations where freshwater is scarce. For this reason, desalination of seawateror brackish water is one of the essential solutions to the worldwide problem of water scarcity. However, the main barriers to the general adoption of desalination systems are the substantial upfront technology costs, and the large amount of energy that is needed for the technological processes. The major goal of AQUASOL is to develop a technological platform that enables the massive penetration of renewable energy sources into the desalination technology with no impact on the power network and providing disruptive, energy-efficient solutions for saline/brackish water pre-treatment and filtration, as well as brine and wastewater recycling. The system will be supplied with hybrid energy storage system and connected to the modular fault-tolerant multiport converter. This approach will help not only to reduce number of power electronics converters, provide both long-term and short-term energy storage capabilities, stabilize the system against intermittent renewable energy inputs but also support grid-independent operation in remote or island scenarios. A combination of novel two-dimensional material-based membranes and specific chemicals for seawater and wastewater treatment will be developed. To maintain minimum energy consumption during operation, the model-based energy management system will be developed, too. This closed-loop approach minimizes waste and maximizes resource utilization for irrigation in agriculture. The concept will address and investigate societal challenges of technology adoption and measures to overcome identified challeges

The building and construction sector accounts for 37% of global emissions (2023). To mitigate the environmental impact of this sector, bio-based products are a promising solution especially when they are sourced from secondary bio-based materials. The CIRCBUILT project will gather 7 academic partners and 5 industries (SMEs mainly) for 36 months to propose a novel high value-added pathway for bio-based waste/residue sources of lignocellulose from the agricultural, agrofood and forestry industries, while being aligned with the cascading principles. Three novel intermediate components will act as main building blocks: foam-formed materials manufactured using two novel resource-efficient processes; first-of-a-kind thermochromic nanocellulose-based films and coatings; isocyanate- and formaldehyde-free bio-based binders as unique selling point on the adhesive market. This will serve as basis to the development and validation at TRL5 of four different types of products 100% made from secondary bio-based materials for the construction sector: 1) thermal insulation panels, 2) construction panels, 3) adapting cooling windows, and 4) indoor acoustic panels. Their technical performances will be comparable to their respective fossil-based benchmark, while unlocking the potential of circular value chains. A mock-up integrating the four products will be created for dissemination purposes, even to young generations of end-users. CIRCBUILT will engage with key stakeholders from the construction sector, as well as the broader cultural and artistic sector for going way beyond alignment with stakeholders’ requirements and NEB values; key stakeholders will be gathered in a Stakeholder Forum from the project’s beginning and actively participate in the products’ development and design creative processes. Novel circular business models will serve as basis to the overall project’s exploitation, preparing the industrialisation and commercialisation of the CIRCBUILT products.

AI and big data are fundamentally interwoven into our societies, culture and indeed into our expectations and conceptions of democratic governance and exchange. They can also, however, contribute to an environment for citizens that is distinctly anti-democratic. KT4D will harness the benefits of an understanding of these as knowledge technologies to foster more inclusive civic participation in democracy. To achieve this, we will develop and validate tools, guidelines and a Digital Democracy Lab demonstrators platform. These results will be validated across three user needs scenarios: 1) building capacity for citizens and citizen-facing Civil Society Organisations (CSOs); 2) creating regulatory tools and services for Policy and CSOs; and 3) improving awareness of how to design ethically and mindfully for democracy principles in academic and industrial software development. Our work is underpinned by the understanding that to fully address the social and fundamental rights costs of AI and big data, we need more than just technological fixes, we need more than just technological fixes, we need to address the underlying cultural influences and barriers. Most importantly, we understand the threats to democracy of AI and big data not only through the nature of what they do, but via the cultural disruptions they create with power dynamics they shift, their tendency toward opacity, and the speed at which they change. KT4D’s ambitious and disruptive results will drive transformation in how democracy and civic participation are facilitated in the face of rapidly changing knowledge technologies, enabling actors across society to capitalise on the many benefits these technologies can bring in terms of community empowerment, social integration, individual agency, and trust in both institutions and technological instruments, while confidently mitigating potential ethical, legal and cultural risks.