The 12th SusChem Stakeholder Event celebrating 10 Years of Sustainable Chemistry at the Forefront of European Innovation!

The 2014 SusChem Stakeholder event was a special meeting for the European sustainable chemistry community: celebrating 10 years of the SusChem European Technology Platform and looking forward to the next 10 years of success with the new SusChem Strategic Innovation and Research Agenda (SIRA). Some 200 delegates joined SusChem at the Renaissance Hotel in Brussels on June 11 and June 12 to reflect on our joint achievements and to toast a sustainable future.

Since it launch in 2004, SusChem has made many significant achievements - including the initiation of projects worth more than € 1.5 billion in FP7, its visionary flagship projects such as the Smart Energy Home, the F3 Factory and Integrated Biorefinery, and more recently the launch of two large Public-Private-Partnerships (PPPs) under Horizon 2020 : SPIRE and the BBI JTI.

Chairman of the SusChem board, Dr. Klaus Sommer summed up the first decade of SusChem saying: "When we started SusChem we had a lot of ground work to cover, but we were successful in establishing SusChem as a voice to be taken seriously." He also reminded delegates that: "The 3Ps of sustainability - Planet, People, Profit - are at the heart of everything that we do at SusChem."

The SusChem event was opened by the screening of a specially made SusChem 10th Birthday video (see below) featuring many personalities from the SusChem community past and present.



Looking forward Dr Sommer stated that SusChem would need to fight continuously to ensure that the competitiveness of the European chemical and biotech industry remains strong. The platform must continue to drive and develop SusChem strategy and foster the SusChem national technology platform network to establish an excellent strategy that can really improve European competitiveness.

Praise for SusChem
Praise for SusChem was also reflected by Clara de La Torre, Director of Key Enabling Technologies at the European Commission DG Research and Innovation who said: "SusChem has achieved outstanding results and was a great success story" and concluded her presentation declaring: "Long life to SusChem!"

The SusChem event also generated some great media coverage including articles in IHS Chemical Week, Chemical Watch and Specialty Chemicals magazine.

More to come!
And SusChem is putting together a longer video message on our achievements and the way forward that will be released around the actual tenth anniversary of the launch of SusChem on 6 July 2004.

We will also be publishing overview articles on various chapters of the new SusChem SIRA over the next few months.

As Klaus Sommer concluded at the Stakeholder event. "Lets start the success for the next 10 years now!"

For more information on SusChem activities and the new SusChem SIRA contact Jacques Komornicki, SusChem Coordinator at Cefic.