The built environment accounts for at least 40% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. For the Alps, it is key to use local resources effectively while upholding EU rules and promoting the adoption of common standards across the building value chain. 

The European Interreg Alpine Space project BAUHALPS is endeavouring to meet these challenges by developing and testing a model that combines New European Bauhaus concepts with sustainability measurements and indicators in an innovative way.

incommon is a non-profit organisation that encourages people to adopt the circular economy as a way of life. They use a bottom-up approach, working with individuals, schools, businesses, institutions, groups and local authorities.

Their approach ensures that people are informed about circular economy principles and engaged in implementing them, enabling them to make sustainable choices and drive local change.

Renewaball introduced the world’s first fully circular tennis and padel balls, designed with recycled materials sourced from used balls collected across European clubs.

This project embodies eco-friendly design by reusing rubber from old balls and using biodegradable wool felt to replace conventional polyester and nylon, which reduces microplastic pollution. 

SUSTAINair was an H2020-funded project developing circular economy principles for the aviation and aerospace design, manufacturing, operations and end-of-life phases. 

The Horizon Europe POLYMEER project aims to establish a sustainable bio-based value chain for bioplastic products. By efficiently converting wet brewers’ spent grain into high added value materials, it is endeavouring to diversify the array of innovative material solutions capable of replacing traditional plastics.

Purman Recycling and Processing Ltd. has developed the purman® method, a mechanical recycling process for rigid polyurethane (PU) and polyisocyanurate (PIR) foams. 

The Horizon Europe project CHEERS is a new biorefinery concept. It takes underutilised or waste secondary streams (such as bagasse, wastewater, CO₂ and CH₄) from the brewery industry, processes them in biorefineries and converts them into innovative bio-based products. 

It produces bioproducts for industrial applications: insect protein, disinfectant, microbial protein, ectoine and caproic acid.

The SCALE-UP project helps regional multi-actor partnerships identify and scale-up innovative, sustainable bio-based value chains that build on regional resources.

It aims to adapt, implement and evaluate tools to help regional actors overcome bottlenecks towards fully exploiting circular bioeconomy potential. In this way, it will promote regional, rural, local/urban and consumer-based transitions towards a sustainable, regenerative, inclusive and just circular economy and bioeconomy across all regions of Europe.

The RECERCO project recovered fired sherds, a form of waste generated when manufacturing ceramic tiles. It proved that it is feasible to use this as a secondary raw material for manufacturing new ceramic tiles and as a reinforcement agent for polymeric matrices to obtain composites for the construction industry.

The METALLON research project aims to improve the process of reusing and recycling lithium-ion batteries in order to recondition them. If this is not possible, it wants to optimise recycling and recovery processes to extract and recover the lithium and other high-value metals and minerals contained in these batteries.