R4R launches Survey, Website

Today (April 9) the SusChem supported FP7 project ‘Chemical Regions for Resource Efficiency’ (R4R) launched its new website and an online survey. SusChem stakeholders are invited to contribute to the survey which will set the priorities for the project that aims to overcome fragmentation across Europe’s innovative regions and set the agenda for achieving some ambitious resource efficiency targets.

Global chemicals and manufacturing industries are at the core of our modern industrial society, developing and producing the key chemicals, materials, medicines and products that allow us to achieve ever better standards of living.

Both industry and society are looking to develop real opportunities to rejuvenate and transform the chemical and process industries into highly eco-efficient high-technology solution providers through changes such as:

• Switching to biobased feedstock
• Improving efficiency of processes
• Recycle wasted materials
• Facilitating an integrated approach to ensure synergies between industrial sectors

R4R survey
Today, on its new website, the R4R project launched an online survey around Europe to picture where the chemical regions are in terms of resource efficiency and fully understand where the focus of the project should be.

“One of the first steps for the R4R project is to understand the regions, the agendas and strategies of the companies and how these align to the regional agendas,” says Pádraig Naughton, Innovation Manager - Resource and Energy Efficiency, at Cefic R&I.

Currently interviews are being conducted to understand the direction of the most important companies and partners in the project. The new online survey that has launched with the opening of the R4R website today serves to supplement and enrich these interviews and gather additional information from the wider community. The survey only takes a few minutes to complete and is available in English, German, Polish and Spanish.

“Once the information has been assembled, by beginning of May, the analysis of the data will be used to pinpoint the priorities in the various regions and to highlight synergies and potential opportunities for cooperation across the regions,” continues Pádraig. “The end result of the project should be joint action plans, which then can feed into proposals for the SPIRE or BRIDGE public-private partnership (PPP) initiatives."

Pádraig Naughton started at Cefic R&I in February and is responsible for R4R amongst other projects. He is on secondment from Dow Chemical, where he has had a long international career mostly in research and development.

“I am a mechanical engineer by training and have focused mostly on application development with customers,” he explains. “My expertise in this field relates to composites, plastics, adhesives, foams and use of computer modeling and simulation to develop applications.”

At Cefic Pádraig will concentrate on defining the needs for the industry in the area of resource and energy efficiency and position this to align with the challenges of the forthcoming Horizon 2020 programme.

About R4R
Launched in late 2012, R4R is funded for three years under the European Commission’s FP7 Research and Innovation Framework Programme. The ‘Chemical Regions for Resource Efficiency (R4R)’ project aims to overcome fragmentation of European ambitious and innovative regions. Through its methodology, R4R could lead the path to a range of promising and positive impacts on resource efficiency.

R4R brings together six complementary EU Regions (Aragon in Spain, Göteborg in Sweden, North Rhine–Westphalia in Germany, the Port of Rotterdam and the South-West regions in the Netherlands, and West Pomerania in Poland), each with their own public and private research and innovation expertise. The R4R project aims to achieve a major step improvement in regional and transnational cooperation among its participating regions and will develop practices, tools and examples which can be easily disseminated to and adopted by multiple European regions to improve regional and cross-regional collaboration in general, and in the process industry on resource efficiency in particular.

Finally, R4R will create a platform for international collaboration on resource efficiency with clusters in third countries to improve and accelerate innovation and promote European eco-innovative technologies globally.

To find out more visit the website or contact Pádraig Naughton at Cefic R&I or project coordinator AnnaSager at SP Technical Research Institute in Sweden.