For decades, heritage buildings have been an example of resilience, but also low emissions and the core of our cities, towns and villages. A building that has no use or purpose is abandoned and lost. It is imperative to ensure their conservation and maintenance by making them accessible, affordable and easy to maintain but also habitable and that is only possible considering comfort as the main target. Heritage buildings represent an important part of our cultural identity. It is time to include them in the adaptation to a new social and energy model. This project aims to demonstrate that it is possible to improve the overall performance of heritage buildings while preserving their architectural and cultural identity. Given that the spectrum of heritage buildings is very broad and those protection laws may allow for different levels of intervention; the project aims to develop a set of solutions that can be replicated in different parts of Europe. The idea seeks to solve the problem of lack of comfort experienced in many heritage buildings where in many cases either there is no heating/cooling system or the use of the existing one entails a significant economic expense due to the need to air-condition large volumes of air. Achieving acceptable levels of comfort is something that will not only benefit the health of the users but will also help to make these buildings attractive places to develop different uses and thus help to preserve them. When we are faced with the energy rehabilitation of a heritage building in which we normally have construction elements with high thermal inertia, the most recommendable solutions to take advantage of this characteristic are usually to insulate the exterior with hygroscopic materials. Unfortunately, in many cases, this intervention is not possible due to problems with the alignment of the street or because the façade is protected. When the only solution is to insulate on the inside, other problems arise, such as humidity buildup.

Around 461 million ton/year of C&DW are generated in EU28. Recent studies on the characterization of C&DW samples at European level revealed a predominant fraction of concrete (52% average). Over the last years, novel technology has been developed aiming to guarantee high quality recycled concrete aggregates for use in new concrete, thereby closing the concrete loop. The most advanced concrete recycling technologies currently produce coarse (>4mm) recycled concrete aggregates by removing cement paste from the surface of the aggregates. However, the fine (0-4 mm) fraction, ca. 40% of the concrete waste, still faces technical barriers to be incorporated into new concrete and consequently, is often down-cycled. At the other extreme, there are minor (e.g. glass) and emerging (e.g. mineral wool) C&DW materials, currently accounting for 0.7% of the total, but revealing growing rates as consequence of European regulations. Those emerging C&DW streams have not yet found technological and business solutions, being mostly landfilled. On the other hand, concrete is the most widely used material in building, with a growing trend towards prefabrication. The European precast concrete sector faces diverse needs for resource efficiency improvement (reduction in natural resource consumption and metabolization of waste materials, reduction in carbon footprint and embodied energy, design for reuse, increase in process efficiency and waste minimization, lighter solutions, enhanced thermal performance through novel cost-effective insulating materials). Aiming at facing these challenges, VEEP main objective is to eco-design, develop and demonstrate new cost-effective technological solutions that will lead to novel closed-loop circular approaches for C&DW recycling into novel multilayer precast concrete elements (for both new buildings and refurbishment) incorporating new concretes as well as superinsulation material produced by using at least 75% (by weight) of C&DW recycled materials.

The development of sustainable, safe and efficient processes for battery recycling is crucial to improve the circularity and strategic autonomy of the European Li-ion battery (LiB) value chain, in line with the objectives of the Battery Partnership launched under Horizon Europe. The objective of the ReUse project is to improve the circularity and sustainability of the entire low-value LFP battery waste stream - from production scrap to end-of-life LiB - by developing new recycling processes that maximize the recovery of input elements and components. Specific objectives include the development of automated sorting and disassembly strategies, the improvement of recycling efficiency and direct reuse of battery materials, and the assurance of sustainability through life cycle assessment, life cycle costing and social impact studies. With a focus on maximizing material recovery, energy efficiency and purity, ReUse will develop a robust, flexible and sustainable direct recycling process for waste streams of varying composition and quality. The project aims to increase the global competitiveness of the European battery ecosystem in line with the European Strategic Plan for a clean and sustainable transition towards climate neutrality. Building on the BATTERY 2030+ Roadmap and the European Partnership on Batteries, ReUse aims to contribute to the policy needs of the European Green Deal and efficient recycling technologies. The project will address the urgent need to address the shortcomings related to the technological, economic and environmental sustainability of recycling EoL LiBs, especially LFP batteries, which make up 46% of the global LiB market by 2030.

Thanks to the development and implementation of several innovative technologies which focus strongly on the efficient use of energy, water and chemicals, a ubiquitous complex multi-material product, the fresh meat packaging consumed by the millions every day, will be thoroughly redesigned to make it fully biobased, smart and recyclable at conventional paper recycling mills. To achieve such remarkable goal, every intermediate product contained in that complex product, i.e., the tray, the barrier coating, the absorbing pad and the transparent film, will be made almost exclusively of wood constituents (fibres, micro-nanofibres, lignin and sugars, which have been chemically or enzymatically modified) and integrated with two food-quality sensors (rotting and cold-chain). Finally, several innovations will be brought to the existing recycling stages, both oriented to increase the overall efficiency of the process: incorporation of specific identification markers to allow precise sorting of the bio-contaminated products, advanced oxidation treatments to both sanitize and decrease energy consumption of the process and chemo-enzymatic revalorization of the recalcitrant fractions.

We will validate an affordable (28% reduction of total costs) and lightweight (35% weight reduction) solution for envelope insulation to bring existing curtain wall buildings to “nearly zero energy” standards while complying with the structural limits of the original building structure and national building codes. Two key commercial insulating products: • Highly insulating mono-component and environmentally friendly spray foam, EENSULATE foam, for the cost-effective automated manufacturing and insulation of the opaque components of curtain walls as well as for the significant reduction of thermal bridges during installation (SELENA and EVONIK in cooperation with ULSTER); • Lightweight and thin double pane vacuum glass, EENSULATE glass, for the insulation of the transparent component of curtain walls, manufactured through an innovative low temperature process using polymeric flexible adhesives and distributed getter technology, thus allowing to use both annealed and tempered glass as well as low emissivity coatings (AGC, SAES and TVITEC in cooperation with ULSTER and UNIVPM ). A multi-functional thermo-tunable coating will allow for dynamic solar gain control as well as anti-fogging and self-cleaning properties (AGC in cooperation with UCL). They will enable insulating solutions that Focchi, DAPP and Unstudio will promote with two different levels of performance: • EENSULATE Basic curtain wall modules where the thermal and acoustic insulation will be provided by the novel EENSULATE glass and EENSULATE foam in the spandrel combined with state of the art low-e coated glass; • EENSULATE Premium modules integrating the thermo-chromic coated glass with additional self-cleaning and anti-fogging functionalities. BGTEC will exploit the limited thickness and high insulating properties of the EENSULATE glass to introduce in their range innovative solutions for the fenestration challenges in historical buildings, compatible with the original window frames and sash designs.