Circular Flooring focuses on the recovery of the PVC compound from post-consumer PVC floor coverings and the separation of legacy plasticisers in order to create a recycled material for the manufacturing of new PVC floor coverings.
European project BIOnTop obtains promising results in development of new recyclable and compostable packaging. In its first year, BIOnTop has achieved good results in its experimental work on copolymers and compounds with customized biodegradability and multifunctional coating solutions with customized properties.
AIMPLAS, the Plastics Technology Centre, is coordinating a project called C-SERVEES to develop more circular products like washing machines, laser printers and toner cartridges, TV sets and telecom equipment.
Is your lifestyle good or bad for the environment? After taking this short test by the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, you will receive tailor-made tips. The aim is to help you save time and money and so to improve your quality of life.
The CYCLE 2013-2017 interdisciplinary project, supported by the Research Council of Norway, focused on the food supply chain from both agriculture and marine sectors, with the aim to improve utilisation of raw materials in a bio-economical perspective.
Circular economy will profoundly impact business. The Circular Economy Research Center of the Paris based École des Ponts Business School wants to enable current and prospect students as well as the alumni of the School to sharpen their knowledge on the upcoming transformation and to be enabled to understand it, embrace it and prepare for it in their domains of professional interest.
C123 is an EU-funded project aiming at transforming the largely available and unexploited methane resources into C3 hydrocarbons, particularly propylene.
AIMPLAS, the Spanish Plastics Technology Centre, is coordinating the LIFE CIRC-ELV project (other participants are Desguaces Cortés, Sigit and Sigrauto from Spain, Indra from France, and Isolago from Portugal) with the aim of creating a new, technically and economically viable network in Europe for reuse and recovery of at least 95% by weight of end-of-life vehicles.
AIMPLAS, the Plastics Technology Centre, and OLIPE, Olivarera de los Pedroches, have carried out a project entitled GO-OLIVA, aimed at finding a high value-added application for olive stone waste by producing a new sustainable material for oil product packaging.
In the third year of the RepescaPlas project, chemical recycling will be used to turn marine litter into fuel for fishing boats. During the first two years of the RepescaPlas project, five tonnes of marine litter were recovered through mechanical recycling operations.
LIFE REFOREST is a project funded by the LIFE Programme that aims to mitigate the soil loss associated with post-fire episodes in forest areas.
LIFE Green Sewer is a LIFE Program funded project that aims to implement a new secondary wastewater treatment of industrial water.
The overall objective of BIORECOVER is the research and development of a new sustainable and safe process, essentially based on biotechnology, for selective extraction of a wide range of critical raw materials (CRMs) such as Rare Earths, Magnesium or Platinum Group Metals.
The PLATIRUS project seeks to address the European shortage of Platinum Group Metals (PGMs) by recovering PGMs from alternative secondary resources. It has the potential to offer a substitute for a large proportion of these critical raw materials which are becoming ever more scarce.
Rare Earth Elements (REEs) are considered as "key enablers" of green technologies. However, they are also the elements with the highest supply risk.
The EU funded project REE4EU has developed processes that may help to regain REEs from RE-containing waste streams.
The EU-funded CABRISS project aims at pioneering a circular economy dedicated to handling the critical situation of recycling the considerable amount of photovoltaic waste for the photovoltaic, but also for the electronic and glass industry.
The Dublin City University VALOR project is investigating potential recovery options for the Organic Fraction of the Municipal Solid Waste (OFMSW) and Bio-Stabilised residual waste (BSRW). The project fully diagnoses the recovery options for municipal solid waste and validates their use by determining their benefits and potential environmental risks.
VertECO consists of a vertical ecosystem (vertical constructed wetland) treating greywater from handwash basins, showers, and laundries.
C-SERVEES is a European project that aims to boost a resource-efficient circular economy in the electrical and electronic (E&E) sector through the development, testing, validation and transfer of new circular economic business models based on systemic eco-innovative services.
Use of recycled plastic material (rPM) in North West Europe is homogeneously low. In packaging and building, the highest plastic-consuming sectors, only 8% of plastic employed is recyclate (Plastics Europe 2016). The Interreg NWE research project Di-Plast develops digital technology to enable complete documentation and quality assurance of recycled plastic material flows.
Simina LAKATOS is founding President of the Institute for Circular Economy and Environment "Ernest Lupan" (IRCEM) since 2012. Simina has economical and technical knowledge, abilities and experience: she holds a B.A. in Economics and a B.A. Honours in Materials and Environment Engineering. She obtained a Doctorate in Engineering and Management in 2011 after defending her thesis on Corporate Social Responsibility.
Simina has been part of the Department of Management and Economical Engineering of UTC since 2011, where she teaches and researches the following areas: Sustainable Development with focus in circular economy, Strategic Management with focus in social economy, Enterprise Assessment and Marketing and International Management, all of which helps her to develop the IRCEM. Her focus is to accelerate, national, regional and EU, the transition towards circularity from the bottom up with concerted actions, developing practical and scalable solutions, organized local-regional-EU campaigns, communicating and involving others in the dissemination of the circular economy information and sustainable development message. Simina is Romanian and is fluent in English and Italian.
Laura Cutaia, researcher at ENEA is an Environmental Engineer (1996) with a PhD in raw materials engineering (2002). Her main research topics are:
Laura Cutaia is the Responsible of Laboratory for Valorization of Resources at ENEA , where she is working on circular economy and resource efficiency, industrial ecology and symbiosis, LCA, environmental certification schemes, REACH regulation and sustainable industrial areas (more information).
Laura Cutaia is also the President of SUN - Symbiosis Users Network (Italian network for industrial symbiosis) and the President of UNI CT 057 on Circular Economy that is working with ISO TC 323 on circular economy. UNI is the Italian competent body for standardization.
Separate collection of paper for recycling will boost the Circular Economy in Europe.