Indo-European Water Partnership to highlight Opportunities 7 March

As part of the Indo-European Water Partnership, the Indian Ministry for Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation and the European Union are organising a meeting with EU businesses in New Delhi on 7 March 2016. The meeting takes place at 14h00 local time (09h30 Central European Time) in New Dehli at the Lalit New Delhi hotel and will be relayed via a video conference to enable wider participation by EU businesses.

The meeting will be attended by Shri Shashi Shekhar, Indian Secretary of the Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation and the EU’s Ambassador to India Tomasz Kozlowski.

The meeting will examine a number of key water challenges for which the Government of India is seeking solutions. These include:

• Municipal Sewage 
• Industrial Effluents – in particular for Tanneries, Pulp and Paper, Distilleries and Textiles sectors 
• Water Quality Monitoring (WQM) for Industrial effluent monitoring (on discharge) and River Health (Over 113 WQM sites are to be established along the river Ganga)
• Geographical Information System (GIS) based Ganga river basin mapping 
• Micro-irrigation 

More information
More information on the event can be found here and you can register here.

Registration for the meeting and the video conference is free and will require provision of additional optional information for dissemination at the meeting and/or via the EIP Water website and the European Business and Technology Centre (EBTC) portal. If you have any comments or questions they should be sent to the Support facility to the Indo-European Water Partnership by 4 March 2016 at the latest.

Climate-KIC unveils four new climate change innovation programmes

Today (15 May) the Climate-KIC, the European Union’s main climate innovation initiative, has announced €100+ million funding for long-term programmes aimed at fighting the climate change challenge. At least two of these new programmes will be of interest to SusChem stakeholders.

The four new flagship pan-European innovation programmes will accelerate efforts in climate change mitigation and adaptation and will be supported by a combination of Climate-KIC, partner and external sources of funding to the tune of more than €100 million over the next four years. The programmes will start this year.

The new innovation programmes will incorporate a range of pioneering research, innovation and entrepreneurship in diverse technology sectors including:

• Sustainable urban environments
• Climate-friendly homes and offices
• Exploiting CO2 as a resource
• Catastrophe models for the finance industry

Mary Ritter, Climate-KIC Chief Executive Officer, said: “These new flagship initiatives will provide focus and impact for Climate-KIC’s approach to climate change mitigation and adaptation. These innovation programmes enable us to expand our work with climate experts, educators and innovative entrepreneurs across Europe to address climate change mitigation and adaptation – and shape the world’s next economy.”

The four programmes were announced at the European Business Summit in Brussels.

Exploiting CO2 as a resource
Under the leadership of Bayer MaterialScience, the enCO2re programme will further broaden the approach for CO2 re-utilisation, connecting technology leaders as well as leading European universities and institutes in order to leverage a broad utilisation of CO2 as feedstock for chemical value chains. Bayer MaterialScience has successfully demonstrated the feasibility of utilising CO2 as polymer feedstock and the news on this new project came on the same day as Bayer announced plans for an industrial scale plant producing CO2-based polyols in Europe.

Following a successful test phase and promising market analysis, Bayer MaterialScience plans to invest € 15 million in the construction of a production line at its Dormagen site to use CO2 to produce a precursor for premium polyurethane foam. The line will have an annual production capacity of 5,000 metric tons. The objective of the “Dream Production” project is to launch the first product on the market in 2016. Processors of polyols and polyurethanes have already expressed considerable interest.

#useCO2
Within the new enCO2re programme turning CO2 into high-value products, as well as evaluating the required infrastructure, will contribute to further decoupling energy and resource consumption from industrial growth a major objective of SusChem and the SPIRE2030 PPP.

Christoph Sievering, Head of Strategic Energy Management, Bayer MaterialScience commented: “Bayer believes in the potential of industrial symbiosis and open innovation. Climate-KIC offers a unique umbrella for further leveraging our ambitions to turn value chains into closed carbon cycles. The Climate-KIC enCO2re flagship is an industry initiative for enabling CO2 re-use. Climate-KIC drives innovation by connecting industry and technology leaders and convinced us with its three-pillar concept of innovation support, educational programmes and start-up acceleration.”

Other Partners of the enCO2re project include: Imperial College London, Delft University of Technology, Chalmers University of Technology, Laborelec, Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, RWTH Aachen, GDF Suez, TU Berlin, and AkzoNobel.

Climate-friendly homes and offices
The Building Technologies Accelerator will bring together multidisciplinary ‘living lab’ teams across Europe to address the climate impact of new building technologies and accelerate the potential of low carbon products and services in the built environment. By the end of 2014, a range of new prototype technologies will be ready to be launched across Europe’s building sector.

Last year SusChem published a report on Key Innovations in Energy Efficiency in Buildings for Smart Cities that could contribute here and other sustainable chemistry contributions to improved resource and energy efficiency can be found at the Cefic-SusChem Smart Cities website.

Partners for the Building Technologies Accelerator include: Delft University of Technology; ETH Zurich; EMPA; Chalmers University of Technology; Knight Frank; and IVE Spain.

Sustainable urban environments
The Smart Sustainable Districts initiative will help some of Europe’s highest profile city district developments become global exemplar projects testing smart, sustainable systems for replication in other urban areas world-wide. Initially working with four pilot districts from a wider collaborative network of 12, the project will bring together some of the most advanced innovations from Climate-KIC’s network of over 200 partners. The project is led by Imperial College; Institute for Sustainability; TU Berlin; TNO; TU Munich; and Utrecht Sustainability Institute.

The fourth KIC covers ‘Catastrophe models for the finance industry.’

Green light for Bio-Based Industries Initiative!

Today (6 May) EU governments have given the green light to roll out, over 2014-2020, an ambitious Innovation Investment Package worth over €20 billion for public and private investment in research and innovation.  The package is set to tackle some of the EU’s major societal challenges and boost growth and jobs through strategic public-private partnerships (PPP); in particular through the new Bio-Based Industries (BBI) PPP.

The BBI will create new jobs, especially in rural regions, and offer Europeans new and sustainable products sourced and produced locally. Making the economy more sustainable by using renewable resources in a smart and efficient manner will benefit society as a whole.

Bio-based industries will increase the competitiveness of the European economy through re-industrialisation and sustainable growth. New value chains will be created between often unconnected sectors, ranging from primary production and processing industries to consumer brands.

The development of new bio-based products and markets based on smart and efficient use of resources will diversify industries’ revenue streams. The BBI should therefore enable European companies to be more competitive in the global bioeconomy race with the US, China and Brazil.

The BBI is expected to bridge European research knowledge with commercial scale bio-based products, making full use of European scientific and technological knowledge. SusChem has played a significant role in laying the foundations of the BBI initiative and looks forward to supporting its development.

The BBI should benefit all Member States where regions can play an important role through their Smart Specialisation Strategies.

Now that EU governments have given their green light, the BBI will be officially established on the day of publication of the Regulation in the Official Journal of the European Union in early- mid-June.

9 July: launch of the first BBI Calls

The BBI’s first Call for Proposals will be launched on 9 July. The BBI will fund projects aimed at: 

• Building new value chains based on the development of sustainable biomass collection and supply systems with increased productivity and improved utilisation of biomass feedstock (including co- and by-products); 
• Unlocking the utilisation and valorisation of waste and lignocellulosic biomass; 
• Bringing existing value chains to new levels, through optimised uses of feedstock and industrial side-streams while offering innovative added value products to the market, thus creating a market pull and reinforcing the competitiveness of EU agriculture and forest based industries.  
• Bringing technology to maturity through research and innovation, by upgrading and building demonstration and flagship biorefineries that will process the biomass into a range of innovative bio-based products. 

About the Bio-Based Industries Joint Undertaking

The Bio-Based Industries Joint Undertaking is a €3.7 billion Public-Private Partnership (PPP) between the EU and the Bio-based Industries Consortium (BIC). 
The BBI is dedicated to realising the European bioeconomy potential, by turning biological residues and wastes into greener everyday products through innovative technologies and biorefineries, which are at the heart of the bioeconomy.

The BBI is about bridging key sectors, creating new value chains and producing a range of innovative bio-based products to ultimately form a new bio-based community and economy. 

BIC, the industrial partner in the PPP, hosts a unique mix of sectors including agriculture, agro-food, technology providers, forest-based/pulp and paper, chemicals and energy. It is an association that was specifically established in 2012 to collectively represent the private sector in the BBI. To date, BIC has 69 full industrial members (large, SMEs, clusters) and over 100 associate members (RTOs, universities, associations, technology platforms). And it is still growing. 

For more information contact the BIC secretariat or visit the BIC website where you can also find the latest BIC newsletter.

SPIRE > be more

A new video for the Sustainable Process Industry through Resource and Energy Efficiency (SPIRE) PPP was premiered at the cocktail event on the eve of the SPIRE brokerage event earlier in the week in Brussels. 'SPIRE > be more' is now uploaded on the web and embedded below. Please feel free to share with colleagues and research partners.



SPIRE is a proposal for a European Public-Private Partnership (PPP) dedicated to innovation in resource and energy efficiency and enabled by the process industries. It is supported by eight European process industry sectors: cement, ceramics, chemical, engineering, minerals, non-ferrous metals, steel and water.

Find out more about SPIRE
To find out more about SPIRE visit the website or contact the SPIRE secretariat.

SusChem: real innovation for growth

One of the highlights of the Knowledge4Innovation (K4I) Fifth European Innovation Summit held at the beginning of October was the Cefic and SusChem organised lunchtime debate on Innovation for Growth. Entitled ‘Think Big, Think Possible, Think Tomorrow’ the session explored what sustainable chemical innovation can bring featuring the SPIRE public private partnership (PPP) and novel concepts to exploit an untapped European resources: carbon dioxide (CO2).

The host of the session was Edit Herczog, MEP and K4I Governing Board Member. She opened the session saying: “That change is important for Europe and that we cannot talk about change without talking about chemistry: this is a key enabler for change across so many sectors.”

Dr Klaus Sommer of Bayer Technology Services and Chairman of A.SPIRE described the proposed PPP. He stressed that SPIRE represented a very large part of EU industry and would enable a focus on areas where Europe has real globally competitive strength.

An important element of SPIRE’s proposed programme will be demonstration activities and the initiative was attracting a lot of attention in the process community across Europe. Large-scale collaboration between competitor companies would be a feature of SPIRE’s programme. He did not see that this would be a problem due to the success of SusChem FP7 project: The F3 Factory.

In this €30 million initiative competitors had united around a single project and also the infrastructure for the project had been enabled through a German regional PPP. Some of the results from this project included reduction in capital expenditure of up to 40% for processes and production operation costs reduced by up to 20%.

SPIRE commitment
The SPIRE PPP was a commitment for open innovation he said and the financial input from industry would beat least € 200million industry per annum. “This is really about ‘Thinking Big’ and thinking what is possible,” he said. “The SPIRE roadmap is only the beginning – we need to achieve projects and we are ready to go!”

Rudolf Strohmeier, Deputy Director-General of DG Research and Innovation at the European Commission said that for growth “research and innovation are not sufficient by themselves. There was also a need for a market and the need for strong collaboration between public and private partners.”

He said that PPPs can make the research and innovation cycle more efficient. He felt that the chemical industry was uniquely positioned as it represents the economic roots of the EU and that SPIRE includes key parts of the manufacturing base in Europe and therefore was key to enabling progress in resource efficiency. He also saw CO2 as a potentially interesting feedstock. He concluded by saying that the Commission was ready to support SPIRE.

CO2 for Growth
The final presentation was by Prof Gabriele Centi from the University of Messina, who gave a technical overview of the potential of CO2 as a feedstock. He said that “CO2 is neither a polluter nor a waste” and that it could be “a raw material that enabled change for society.”

He sees CO2 as a valuable carbon source and a key element to realise energy and resource efficiency and introduce new renewable energy concepts. The carbon-based economy would provide a new scenario for sustainable chemicals production that integrated biomass and CO2 as feedstocks for a “new chemistry for the future”.

Prof Centi described a variety of CO2 using processes that were already developed or would be in the short to medium term. He also looked at a long term vision of developing artificial leaves that would remove ambient CO2 foe the air to make fuel or materials.

The (re)use of CO2 could be a massive opportunity for Europe he concluded. It could exploit a currently untapped resource and contribute to reducing GHG emissions and be a major driver of innovation and growth.

Earlier Jos Keurentjes of Akzo Nobel described some of the smart and green chemistry that was being used and developed at his company. The main focus was on areas such as energy and resource efficiency, products and services based on renewable and biobased raw materials, and looking at how to close loops in materials supply through recycling and reuse. He saw the use of CO2 as potential feedstock for a variety of processes (see image above). He concluded by emphasising that: “Speeding up growth is about value chain innovation.”

Don’t bury CO2
In questions at the end of the session Gernot Klotz of Cefic said that the concept of a ‘CO2 economy’ was a big beast that required vision.

Paraphrasing Shakespeare he said: “I come here to praise CO2, not to bury it.” Utilisation of CO2 as a feedstock will be part of the SPIRE project portfolio, but there needs to be a discussion about where it might be placed within the Horizon 2020 programme.

SusChem: An ETP2020 for Innovation and Growth in Europe

SusChem, the European Technology Platform for Sustainable Chemistry, has released a new video describing its new role as an 'ETP2020'. The announcement of SusChem's achievement of ETP2020 status was made on 12 July 2013 and coincided with the publication of a European Commission document on a 'Strategy for European Technology Platforms: ETP 2020'.

ETP2020 organisations will be a valuable tool for Horizon 2020 and the ETP 2020 strategy seeks to maximise the impact of European Technology Platforms (ETPs), such as SusChem, on Europe’s competitiveness and sustainability.

The new SusChem video (below) features contributions from SusChem Chairman Dr Klaus Sommer, Waldemar Kutt from the cabinet of European Commissioner for Research and Innovation Maire Geoghegan-Quinn, and Fernando Moreno, CEO of Solutex and SusChem board member.

The video 'SusChem: An ETP2020 to Promote Innovation and Growth in Europe' describes the important role of Technology Platforms in EU research and innovation strategy and the specific objectives that SusChem has in areas such as resource efficiency, water, critical raw materials, smart cities, key enabling technologies, and education and skills.

The video concludes with discussion of the scale of the opportunity for SusChem to contribute to EU growth and jobs and the added value that SusChem brings to EU and transnational innovation initiatives. Enjoy!



More information
For more information on SusChem activities and how you can participate visit the SusChem website or contact the SusChem secretariat.

BIO-TIC identifies Five Breakthrough Bio-based Products

The SusChem inspired BIO-TIC FP7 has identified five bio-based product groups that could have the potential to boost EU competitiveness and make a breakthrough in industrial biotechnology.

The five business cases were selected following a meeting of the BIO-TIC Advisory Committee earlier in 2013. The five business cases were selected from a list of the most promising bio-based chemicals in order to assess market orientations and 'societal' potential in Europe up to 2030.

All the cases were selected according to a criteria grid that analysed their industrial biotechnology breakthrough potential, their competitiveness in the EU market, their critical mass (analysed in terms of market projection for value and growth potential), their environmental impact, and their societal impacts.

The five product groups are:

• Non drop-in bio-based polymers (PLA and PHA)
• Chemical building blocks (platform chemicals – with a focus on succinic acid, isoprene, furfural, 1.3-PDO & 3-HPA)
• Bioethanol (2nd generation biofuels from waste) and bio-based jet fuels
• Biosurfactants
• CO2 as a bio-based feedstock

These product groups are all thought to be EU- competitive, have the potential to overcome non bio-based industry barriers, and will introduce 'cross-cutting' technology ideas.

Enzymes were not selected as a specific business case as they were considered to be a cross-cutting element that should be part of all of the five product groups selected.

For more information about the business cases, contact BIO-TIC project coordinator Antoine Peeters.

About BIO-TIC
The 'Industrial Biotech Research and Innovation Platforms Centre – towards Technological Innovation and solid foundations for a growing industrial biotech sector in Europe’ project (or BIO-TIC) was launched in September 2012 and is a three-year project offering “a solutions approach” centred on a solid road mapping exercise that will involve a broad stakeholder base from industry, knowledge organisations, governments and civil society. Three intermediary road maps will focus on market assessments and projections, research and innovation as well as non-technological barriers such as feedstock.

A series of stakeholder workshops will take place at national and European level to reach a comprehensive view on solutions BIO-TIC can offer to accelerate market uptake of industrial biotechnology. The final aim of the project will be to draw up a blueprint document with a comprehensive set of policy recommendations for overcoming the identified innovation hurdles within a selection of European business and societal opportunities.

You can find out more about the project at the BIO-TIC website and there is an active BIO-TIC Linked-In group that is open to anyone interested in the transformative potential of industrial biotechnology. The project is coordinated by EuropaBio.

2013 SusChem Stakeholder Event

The dates for the 2013 SusChem Stakeholder event have just been announced. The event entitled ‘The root of EU Growth and Jobs: Innovative Materials and Processes’ will take place on 14 – 15 May 2013 in Brussels. The meeting will primarily address the benefits of partnerships to boost EU growth and improve its competitiveness and how SusChem will play a part in this. Join us at our eleventh stakeholder event and get the latest insights!

SusChem has evolved into a Europe-wide platform that captures the full benefit of Europe’s strengths in research and provides a well-connected network for innovation in the chemical and biotechnology value chain. As a result, its strategy has evolved too.

The new SusChem 2020 strategy retains research, innovation and education actions at the heart of our activities. These three activities are important to engage with policy makers and partner organizations to shape research and innovation policies and deliver truly sustainable innovation that creates value in and for European society.

To achieve its ambitious objectives, the platform’s partnership activities will also need to expand strategically. This means a substantial increase in multidisciplinary and cross-sector working along value chains. The new strategy is also designed to strengthen cooperation between SusChem Europe and our network of National Technology Platforms.

With this new strategy and its broad and growing stakeholder base, SusChem aims to ensure that research is effectively turned into innovative products and services that will shape Europe’s future.

Where and when?
Join us at the SusChem Stakeholder Event next year in Brussels to see examples of the new strategy in action!

The event will take place at the Hotel Sofitel Europe on Place Jourdan in the heart of the European Quarter in Brussels.

More information on speakers and the programme will be available in the New Year. In the meantime reserve the dates in your diary!

For more information on SusChem activities, please contact the SusChem secretariat.