If food loss and waste (FLW) were a country, it would be the third leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions. FLW also burdens waste management systems and exacerbates food insecurity, , contributing significantly to the three global crises of climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollution and waste. PRECIOUS, an transdisciplinary alliance of 20 entities from 11 EU countries, believes that reliable data on the environmental impacts of FLW is crucial for accelerating EU progress towards climate targets and reducing environmental impacts (including biodiversity) across the food supply chain. The project´s collective understanding is that the challenge goes beyond measuring the amount of food saved or CO2 emissions. When food is wasted, valuable and limited resources such as water, land use, and energy are lost, while 8.9% of the worldwide population is suffering from hunger accordingto FAO, therefore, depleting the planet's natural resources. It is critical to broaden our understanding of the issue to transform the food system and raise public awareness that motivate change. PRECIOUS aims to contribute to the transformation of food systems by addressing existing data gaps and developing a unified and openly accessible evaluation framework to quantify the economic, environmental, and social impacts of strategies to reduce FLW, taking into account potential rebound effects. The project will engage stakeholders from 2 Use Cases (Spain and Greece) and 3 Co-creation and Replication Nodes (Poland, Lithuania, Hungary) to address systemic causes across geographical boundaries. The project aims to induce a fundamental change in attitudes and behaviours towards food consumption and disposal through collaborative efforts and innovative methods, fostering a more just and sustainable EU food system.

Conventional Retrofitting (CR) can result in high energy use reductions at the expense of high installation costs and, usually, without being able to directly perform harvesting from Renewable Energy Sources (RES). Building Automation (BA) systems, as compared to CR, can result in medium energy use reductions and in low or medium harvesting from RES at the expense of medium installation costs and medium operational costs. Recently, the concept of Adaptable/Dynamic Building Envelopes (ADBE) - such as Multifunctional Façade Modules - has been proposed towards overcoming many of the shortcomings of CR and BA. ADBE systems can result in high energy use reductions and high harvesting from RES at the expense of medium-to-high installation costs and medium operational costs. The main strategic goal of the PLUG-N-HARVEST proposal is to design, develop, demonstrate and exploit a new modular, plug-n-play concept/product for ADBE - deployable to both residential and non-residential buildings - which is able to provide high (maximum possible) energy use reductions and high (maximum possible) energy harvesting from RES both at the single-building and the district scale while requiring medium-to-low installation costs and almost-zero operational costs. Moreover, by appropriately exploiting its attributes, the PLUG-N-HARVEST system will be designed and implemented considering circular economy principles, which will allow implementing new business models based on leasing and renting modes and, by this, leaving the door open to massive implementations. Four different multi-building Pilots – in Germany, Spain, Greece and the U.K. - will be used for demonstrating the use of the integrated PLUG-N-HARVEST system in full-scale, on a 24/7 basis and for a long period. The Pilots involve buildings with all different kinds of energetic, thermal and occupants' interactions, home occupants of highly diverse behaviour and background and include both residential and non-residential buildings.