Competitive, low carbon and circular industries
The cross-cutting nature of this call should lead to an improved cooperation and integration between sectors and value chains, and to making circular economy practices more mainstreamed and widespread and contributing to a carbon neutral industry in the medium term.
This call supports the development of innovative productions systems and business models, in which resource efficiencies, waste management and system thinking should be incorporated in the initial design, across sectors that are traditionally resource and energy intensive and/or with significant environmental footprints. The objective is the design and demonstration of profitable and sustainable (circular) value chains of materials, products and services, and of transactions for novel sourcing of required inputs and value-added destinations for non-product outputs between industrial facilities (industrial symbiosis). The environmental, climate, economic and social gains should be assessed from a comprehensive full life cycle perspective, including production and recycling processes, materials, and products (cradle-to-cradle).
In order to strengthen the impact of the activities under the call, clustering of projects around certain activities into portfolios will be facilitated. Proposals are encouraged to be open to clustering activities, including coordinated deliverables and joint dissemination or exploitation activities, with other projects selected under this call and under previous relevant ones.