On average, each European citizen produces approximately 200 kg of municipal biowaste per year, representing between 118 and 138 million tonnes of biowaste annually arising in the EU. The main municipal biowaste management systems currently existing in Europe represent one-way flow systems in which materials and resources are underused, limiting its potential recovery into high-value products. VALUEWASTE proposes an integrated approach in urban biowaste upcycling for the production of high-value biobased products, developing the first complete solution to fully valorise biowaste that can be replicated across Europe. We will implement three new value chains that will use urban biowaste as raw material for its valorisation into high-value end products in a cascading process, generating economic, social and environmental benefits: food & feed proteins and other ingredients, and biobased fertiliser. VALUEWASTE will be developed at two very different European locations, Murcia (ES) and Kalundborg (DK) with the purpose of finding a solution both technical and socially adapted to the different socio-economic contexts exiting across Europe. Social initiatives will be created to increase consumer awareness and acceptance of urban biowaste-derived products. End-user products applications and new market opportunities will be demonstrated. Outcomes of the project will contribute to new standardisation, and will be useful information for EU policy makers in terms of waste management and in the adoption of new policies.

It is evident that the process of green transition reshapes national, regional, and local economic landscapes, and triggers change in ecosystems of various industries, thereby highlighting the urgent need to plan efficient and fair strategies to minimise the costs of job destruction and maximise the benefits of job creation in a socially fair way and a geographically equal way, in the wider patterns of reskilling. ISABEL's main objective is to provide a threefold solution to the aforementioned problem related to JCD with the use of new technologies such as AI and Large Language Models (LLM) that will 1) enrich our understanding of the socially and geographically uneven implications of this process across Europe, 2) broaden our knowledge on the factors underlying this process, and 3) highlight pathways of minimising the effects of job destruction and maximising the benefits of job creation, in a socially and spatially fair way. The latter include upskilling and reskilling of workers and the reallocation of labour, based on existing and forecasted skills shortages, using AI technologies to support these tasks. To achieve its main goal, ISABEL will examine the above elements at 3 different levels: i) the aggregate European level, among the EU, UK and Serbian Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics 2 regions (NUTS2), using secondary data, ii) at 6 countries of focus -Denmark, Greece, Poland, UK, Serbia, Spain, collecting and analysing primary data, and iii) Living Labs focusing on 6 regions with diverse socio-economic features.

Project Ô intends to demonstrate approaches and technologies to drive an integrated and symbiotic use of water within a specific area, putting together the needs of different users and waste water producers, involving regulators, service providers, civil society, industry and agriculture. The project seeks to apply the pillars of integrated water management (IWM) as a model for “water planning” (akin to spatial planning) and to demonstrate low cost, modular technologies that can be easily retrofitted into any water management infrastructure at district/plant level, hence enabling even small communities and SMEs to implement virtuous practices. Technologies and planning instruments complement each other as the first make possible the second and the latter can provide as example or even prescribe the former (and similar technologies allowing virtuous water use practices). Indeed the technologies support the regulators in implementing policy instruments, as foreseen by IWM, for convincing stakeholders (like developers and industry) to implement water efficiency strategies and could include instruments for e.g. rewarding virtuous behaviours (for example: advantageous water tariffs), planning regulations that award planning consent more swiftly or even prescribe the use of water from alternative sources (including recycling). Project Ô has in summary the overall objective of providing stakeholders (everybody using or regulating the use of water in an area) with a toolkit that enables them to plan the use of and utilise the resource water whatever its history and provenance, obtaining significant energy savings in terms of avoided treatment of water and waste water and release of pressure (quantity abstracted and pollution released) over green water sources. This overall objective will be demonstrated in up to four sites each in different Countries of Europe and in Israel, involving industries, aquaculture and agriculture as well as local authorities of different sizes.