Action on circularity is not taken when information and evidence is not available across the life cycle chain. The CircThread project's main objective is to unlock access to data now in silo’s, and enhancing it as decision information for actors across and outside the extended product life cycle. To do this CircThread will deliver a Circular Digital Thread methodology, a framework for facilitating information flow exchanges across the extended life cycle chain of Products, Components, their Materials and Chemicals data, and related Circularity, Environmental, Social and Economic Information. The core is to create data linkages between product chain, value chain, asset chain and life cycle chains based on a Product information Catalogue, and enable information exchanges via data contracts governed by secure and reliable management standards. The project will implement the system in Cloud Platforms in 3 demonstration clusters in Italy, Slovenia and Spain rolled-out across the entire extended life cycle chain of home appliances (incl. washing machines and dish washers) and home energy systems (incl. boilers, solar-PV systems and batteries) to test 7 circularity use cases and associated business models. The expected impact for the work programme is to enable improved decision taking accelerating Circularity and Carbon emissions reductions including: i) Enhanced life extensions of products by better understanding of in use failures and maintenance needs, ii) improved understanding of the quality of end-of-life products for spare parts buy-backs to support right to repair, iii) improved assessment of circularity routes by waste management and recycling companies by delivering enhanced product composition data, iv) improved materials and chemicals tracing of products and components for safer products and identifying Critical Raw Materials cycles, v) Empowering decisions by citizens and citizen organisations by providing direct access to product performance information.

The CEWASTE project contributes to an improved recovery of valuable and critical raw materials (CRMs) from key types of waste through traceable and sustainable treatment processes in the entire supply chain of secondary raw materials. As such, CEWASTE will address the specific challenge to secure the sustainable access to CRMs for the EU economy and objectives set by the EU action plan for the Circular Economy, the issue of illegal trade of wastes within the EU and to non-EU countries and the need to support the development of environmentally and socially sound recycling systems globally. Specifically, the project will develop, validate and launch a voluntary certification scheme for collection, transport and treatment facilities of key types of waste containing significant amounts of valuable and critical raw materials. To ensure a comprehensive approach and a robust result, the project will be developed along the following six specific objectives: Objective 1 - Understand existing recovery practice, standards and verification schemes; Objective 2 - Develop sustainability and traceability requirements; Objective 3 - Develop an assurance system and related verification procedures; Objective 4 - Validate the new voluntary scheme; Objective 5 - Ensure long term sustainability of the scheme; Objective 6 - Ensure a transparent stakeholder process.

SUSTCERT4BIOBASED project is set on fostering the adoption of effective and robust sustainability certification schemes and business-to-business labels for industrial biobased systems to support tracing the sustainability of biobased products along the value chains and trades within the EU and globally for responsible production and consumption. To this end, a monitoring system will be developed with a life-cycle perspective along four themes (environment, social, economic and governance) considering the complexity and relationships of all dimensions of sustainability and the rules and procedures on how the schemes are managed. This system will be optimized with pilot audit in practice and testing on existing schemes/labels for biobased systems evaluating their performance in the different themes and their coverage of the list of minimum requirements. Costs and benefits from the adoption of certification schemes and labels will be assessed, considering actual economic as well as internalized environmental and social ones. Data will be generated on volumes of biological resources and biobased products in global trade flow and extent of their certification. We will leverage the results of the project to provide best practices and recommendations to 4 key target groups: policy makers, sustainability system community, industrial biobased value chain actors, and regional/rural bioeconomy stakeholders. Our vision is that this will result in harmonized system requirements, continuous improvement and enhanced adoption of sustainability certification schemes and labels, and provide a significant contribution towards establishing a circular and sustainable bio-based industry for Europe contributing to the Bioeconomy Strategy and Green Deal. The large multi-sectorial stakeholders involvement (through an international Network of Interest domain and a comprehensive Advisory Board) will enable SUSTCERT4BIOBASED to increase outreach and aligning with ongoing international efforts.

There is a need to strengthen the capacity of Market Surveillance Authorities (MSAs) to conduct Ecodesign related market surveillance activities with respect to new and pending industrial and tertiary sector products. Especially in the case of customised products which are unsuitable for testing in laboratories. There is a lack of expertise, experience, and resources available across Europe for such kind of testing. An increasing concern is that new regulations addressing these products risk being unenforceable. The aim of the INTAS project is to address these concerns and provide technical and cooperative support, as well as capacity building activities, to MSAs charged with enforcing these regulations. The need for the INTAS project arises from the difficulty that MSAs and market actors face in establishing and verifying compliance with energy performance requirements for large industrial products subject to requirements of the Ecodesign Directive. The focus of the project is to support compliance for very large industrial products, specifically transformers and industrial fans, with the requirements of the Ecodesign Directive. The energy consumption of transformers and industrial fans is very significant and thus the risk of losses due to poor compliance cannot be ignored. The project aims to: a. support European Member State MSAs deliver compliance for large products (specifically for transformers and large fans); b. support industry to be sure of what their obligations are under the Ecodesign Directive and to deliver compliance in a manner that will be broadly accepted by MSAs; c. foster a common European approach to the delivery and verification of compliance for these products. The INTAS project involves 16 partners among them there are 11 organisations, which are National MSAs or cooperating closely with the National MSAs, targeting 10 European countries (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Italy).

ANTICSS objectives are (i) to assess and define "circumvention" in order to achieve a better product positioning in relation to EU Ecodesign and Energy labelling legislation and relevant harmonised standards; this includes clear delimitation from other effects to facilitate unambiguous public (media) communication; (ii) to collect, analyse and learn from cases of circum¬vention by literature research and dedicated expert interviews, as well as analysing existing EU Ecodesign and Energy labelling legislation and standardisation for possible loopholes. The potential relation between circumvention and "smart" products with specific embedded software will be also addressed. From these findings, conclusions how to better detecting and preventing future circumvention will be derived; (iii) to assess impacts 'if' and 'how much' energy consumption and/or functional performance modifications could be ascribed to circumvention by conducting appliance testing; (iv) to define alternative test procedures or check lists with the aim to by-pass any possible measurement circumvention; based on the results ANTICSS will ensure sustainability beyond the project life by (v) practical capacity building measures for key actors of market surveillance and test laboratories, (vi) supporting communication and collaboration platforms between major stakeholders and (vii) providing policy recommendations for policy makers and standardisation bodies to prevent future circumvention under EU Ecodesign and Energy labelling. ANTICSS will also provide reliability to manufacturers by specifying potentially vague legislation and standards which might be interpreted differently by market actors and some of them taking unfair advantages so far. By overall awareness raising on circumvention among stakeholders, ANTICSS will be supporting an effective EU legislation enforcement and thus increasing acceptance and trust of market actors and civil society into the Ecodesign and Energy labelling legislation.