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.

CLEAR 2.0 - enabling Consumers to be Engage with and Adopt Renewable energy technologies. 2.0- is a new project that builds on the learning of an EU funded project IEE13-588 CLEAR. It will actively guide consumers in the energy market and enable them to be more aware, active players, save money and easily become "prosumers". The Consortium will accompany consumers through all the stages leading to the purchase and the correct efficient use of domestic renewable and low-carbon energy technologies. The CLEAR 2.0 project will focus as well on changing behaviour and optimisation of existing installations. The main needs of a home, including heating/cooling and electricity production (including storage and monitoring systems) will be addressed through a consumer-centric approach and actions that will lead to the changing behaviour and form collective consumer groups to support the purchase of renewable energy technologies such as photovoltaic installations, batteries, pellet stoves and heat pumps for heating and cooling. The three major barriers (awareness, behaviour and price) to the investment in RES will be directly addressed, having as a result a higher consumer engagement. BEUC and the consumers organisation focus their advocacy work on relevant legislative developments in order to overcome existing barriers and facilitate consumers’ participation in the energy market. It will distil policy lessons to create a favourable and stable national and European policy framework for the benefit of all European consumers.

The GVI results will empower the consumer and strengthen the demand side. This will be achieved by informing the consumers through the involved (inter)national consumer organisation and the strong link to Euro NCAP. This GVI project will be the catalyst and initiator for a fully-fledged Green NCAP program, which will help consumers, authorities and all other stakeholders to identify if a vehicle truly is clean and energy efficient. GVI’s vision is: ‘The highest standard is attributed to a car that maximises the reduction of its own pollutants and greenhouse gasses and, at the same time, operates at minimised fossil fuel consumption and/or maximised energy efficiency under real-world conditions during its life time.’ The GVI project will independently assess the full environmental performance of a vehicle in the most comprehensive manner. It is of paramount importance that complex test procedures and results are converted into independent, meaningful and comprehensive information for consumers that can easily be understood. - To develop a holistic assessment methodology of a vehicle’s environmental performance over the vehicle’s useful life - including a complete set of test protocols and test procedures with the aim to independently test vehicles and assess the full environmental performance; - To develop an independent rating system based on developed testing protocols, for the assessment of new vehicles’ performance across multiple criteria (real world fuel consumption, noise, cost ); - To validate the overall methodology by conducting real world and laboratory testing and publish results of the 49 most readily available low emitting vehicles in the market; - Improve the administrative and contractual conditions to run the vehicle environmental performance assessment program beyond the project’s duration; - Maximising transparency by making detailed test results available to interested stakeholders to perform their own analysis and to spark competition.

CLEAR-X - Consumers Leading the EU’s Energy Ambition Response, Expansion - is an ambitious extension of a tried-and-tested methodology, designed and developed to address consumers’ needs. The overall objective is to enable consumers to lead the energy transition by investing in renewable energy and sustainable energy (RES) and energy efficient (EE) technologies. It aims to facilitate consumers’ access to household renewables at an affordable price, through the provision of trusted information, collective purchase schemes and an improved regulatory framework. By the conclusion of CLEAR-X, consumers will have improved the energy performance and comfort of their homes and reduced their energy bills in the long term. The CLEAR-X project will engage 38,000 consumers in collective purchase campaigns in 6 target countries and will trigger over 27M EUR in installations of RES technologies. The project is expected to result in an additional 40 GWh of renewable energy production and trigger 2.15 GWh of primary energy savings within the project duration. Furthermore, the project will help inform a significant number of consumers in the target countries about potential benefits of EE and RES technologies and influence an additional 17,000 consumers to act and save energy. Building on CLEAR (Intelligent Energy Europe) and CLEAR 2.0 (Horizon 2020), CLEAR-X will expand the proven collective purchase model, by engaging and supporting consumer organisations in Eastern and Southern Europe to launch schemes for their national consumers. Consumer organisations participating in CLEAR 2.0 developed considerable expertise in setting up and running collective purchase schemes and CLEAR-X will draw on this experience, both human and technological, to equip consumer organisations in the target countries with the necessary skills to run collective purchases.