The safety of children’s products is essential when it comes to items intended for babies and children aged between 0 and 14, as they are vulnerable consumers. The level of safety of the products on the market not only depends on what the product is made of, but also who distributes them, the institutions that establish the corresponding safety regulations, the consumers, the competent authorities that monitor the market or the health agencies who determine the incidence of injuries caused by using the products and inform parents about the measures to take to prevent lesions. They all form part of a “community” that helps increase the level of safety of the products that are sold on the European market. Out of all these actors (industry, consumers, the authorities, healthcare professionals), there are two, small and medium sized companies and the consumers, whose lack of qualified human resources in this area limit their chances of being able to compete in the market, and with regard to the companies, of being able to increase the level of safety required by the consumers.The ultimate goal of SAMNIC is to provide everyone who is involved with ensuring that children’s products are safe with an open educational resource on this matter to improve the skills of organisations and the expertise of people.As a result of the European project, a platform has been developed called SAMNIC MOOC, which mainly supplies employees from the industry (especially SMEs) and consumer associations with a MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) on how to assess and manage safety in new and innovative children’s products. The platform also enables users to get in touch with other people interested in the safety of children’s products and share their knowledge. In SAMNIC MOOC, users can join a multidisciplinary network of professionals called the SAMNIC community. To this end, SAMNIC MOOC strives to be more than just a course; it is a community that wants to support the collaborative learning of individuals with different profiles who are involved in child safety (industry, consumers, authorities, healthcare professionals and research centres).SAMNIC MOOC has been developed by means of a consortium that, coordinated by the research centre specializing in toys, children’s products and leisure, called the Technological Institute for Children's Products & Leisure, AIJU (Spain), is made up of a Czech Association for Toy and Play, SHH (Czech Republic), Alicante University, UA (Spain), the European Association for the Coordination of Consumer Representation in Standardisation, ANEC (Belgium) and the Universitat Degli Studi Di Padova, UniPd (Italy). The consortium represents the world of research (AIJU), the industry (SHH), specialized education on children’s injuries (UniPd), consumer associations (ANEC), the platform developer and experts in e-learning (UA). Educational material and an open and free online course - SAMNIC MOOC- on how to assess and manage the safety in new and innovative children’s products have been obtained thanks to the project. The course has personalised itineraries that can be adapted to the interests of the user in question. The course is available in Spanish, English, French, Italian, Czech and Portuguese and it can be done using a computer, tablet or a mobile phone. The knowledge and the skills that are acquired with the SAMNIC MOOC multilingual platform have an impact on the personnel of EU organizations and, therefore, on the work that they do. In the industry, the ability to assess and deal with the risks posed by the products that are being developed before launching them on the market, is a factor that minimizes costs and increases the competitiveness of companies. Moreover, the SAMNIC MOOC course focuses especially on the safety of new and innovative products, which means that SAMNIC MOOC provides companies that want to create new products with an extremely valuable resource to combine innovation and safety right from the design concept. Similarly, the global nature of the course, whose key points focus on child safety, covers the evolving capacities of a child, the legal framework in the EU, the standardization, the hazards or the risk management process, among other things and it can help consumer organisations to increase and improve their participation in the consumer policies on a European level and in the standardization committees, and therefore defend consumer interests much better. SAMNIC MOOC will be included in the courses supplied by the content developers, and what is more, the main video lessons are available on social networks, which means they can be accessed outside of the Erasmus+ project development.

Waste production and resource use is increasing for electric and electronic consumer products. At the same time many critical materials cannot be recovered in recycling processes. Therefore a promising strategy would be to lengthen the lifetimes of these products in order to get closer to a Circular Economy. The project PROMPT is going to support the development of more durable and longer lasting products by lowering the asymmetry of information between consumer and manufacturer and thereby to allow consumers to make better choices. This is achieved by the development of an integral testing programme for electric and electronic consumer products that takes into account the main key issues of product failures and premature obsolescence: • Product durability and reliability • Adaptability, upgradability, and reparability • User behaviour and market PROMPT takes a multi-stakeholder approach by including different consumer, test, repair and research organisations in the consortium who will carry out the work. Consequently, results will be achieved that are viable for different stakeholders and independent from manufacturers. With the help of an Advisory Board, additional stakeholder input will be gathered. The board will consist of experts from industry, retail, design, environmental, science and consumer sectors. A baseline of research will be established by collecting empirical data on technical issues, design shortcomings, market obstacles and replacement causes for premature obsolescence. These results will give input to the development of a range of specific testing methods addressing the three fields of issues outlined above. The results will be synthesized in an integral testing programme for premature obsolescence that will be validated and benchmarked through test cases. Results will be analysed and prepared to give validated input to standardisation, product design, consumer communication and policy recommendations.

SmartLivingEPC project aims to deliver a certificate which will be issued with the use of digitized tools and retrieve the necessary assessment information for the building shell and building systems from BIM literacy, including enriched energy and sustainability related information for the as designed and the actual performance of the building. SmartLivingEPC will provide information in relation to the operational behaviour of the building, by introducing a new rating scale, based on a weighted approach of life cycle performance aspects, building smartness assessment and information on the actual performance of the technical systems of buildings provided by technical audits. The new methodologies to be developed, will be based on existing European standards, whereas at the same time, they will trigger the development of new technical standards for smart energy performance certificates. The new certification scheme will also expand its scope, covering aspects related to water consumption, as well as noise pollution and acoustics. SmartLivingEPC certificate will be fully compatible with digital logbooks, as well as with building renovation passports in order to allow the integration of the building energy performance information in digital databases. A special aspect of SmartLivingEPC will be its application in building complexes, with the aim of energy certification at the neighbourhood scale. SmartLivingEPC aspires to develop two parallel schemes, one at the building level (Building EPC) and one at the level of building complex level (Complex EPC), with the ultimate goal in the near future of certification of building complexes, based on the certification of individual units, as well as on additional aspects following an integrated participatory and neighborhood based approach. 16 partners from 12 European countries will collaborate and provide their expertise and resources within the 36 months of SmartLivingEPC lifetime.