The WEEE (waste from electrical and electronic equipment) management chain has realised an explosion of fire incidences, caused by carelessly discarded batteries into either recycling bins or black rubbish bags, where they are easily damaged by sorting equipment and start to burn, endangering human lives, disrupting waste services and causing millions of Euros of damage (from €190,000 up to €1.3m per fire incident). The Grinner project aims at commercialising an autonomous AI-enabled robotic sorting system capable of detecting and removing waste containing batteries from current waste streams before they enter inhospitable-to-battery machines that crush and consolidate waste. The system will comprise (i) the fastest Energy-resolved X-Ray detectors in the market, (ii) an ML-enabled software module that will analyse X-Ray data and effectively detect waste containing batteries while passing through the waste flow and vision-based pick-and-place robot(s) that will remove the flagged WEEE. Project objectives: • Build an X-Ray data set of WEEE scrap. • Customisation of the X-Ray system • Develop the AI software module for detection of batteries within WEEE using X-Ray data. • Deploy a vision-based robotic solution capable of Picking-and-Placing WEEE • Develop, integrate and install a prototype system in a WEEE facility environment to conduct live trials and validate Grinner. • Explore the potential exploitation of Grinner as an economically viable, stand-alone product for recycling facilities.

The Circular Economy paradigm, accelerated within the context of Industry 4.0, has been increasingly applied both inside and outside the manufacturing domain. The set of new capabilities, skills and competencies developed through I4.0 need to be augmented and enhanced in order to conform to the Triple Bottom Line perspective (profit, people, planet).These enhancements initially affect supply chains management and then expand towards entrepreneurship, business model development, innovation management and societal development. Research shows that there is a significant potential to address the complex challenges towards a more sustainable and resilient society by cross-fertilizing these disciplines through the CE perspective, via provisioning new courses and practical cases. For this reason, the joint CE-I4.0 evolution needs to be grounded on a new set of knowledge and best practices to be provided through both high education (HE) and vocational education and training, demanding systemic ways for sustainable development.CERES recognizes the need to shift the restricted focus of CE from firms to a more extended and system-level view that considers skills, competences and knowledge needs (provided from various business sectors such as e-waste, textiles, renewable energy, etc) to be supplied to HE and VET. This would catalyse the embracement of CE under a social development perspective from the preliminary stage of training and education. In this context, CERES’ new innovation ecosystem, the Circular Economy Digital Innovation Hub (CE-DIH), is aimed to promote connectedness among the stakeholders and to generate a systematised set of services, skills, competences and knowledge able to support the multi-faceted CE domain. The CE-DIH can be strategic not only to raise awareness but also to provide the most suitable and complete set of services able to support the circular enrichment and transition of both companies on the market and individuals in society.

Regulation (EU) 2017/1369 aims to promote the uptake of more efficient energy-related products, repealing Directive 2010/30/EU and the first Directive 92/75/EEC. This regulation that will enter into force at the beginning of 2020 will allow a rescaling of the current energy label of products. The rescaling will create many difficulties amongst consumers as well as amongst market actors (retailers, distributors and manufacturers). BELT has the objective to facilitate the transition period informing and supporting all stakeholders and to reduce to a minimum errors at all levels of the value chain from manufacturer to consumer. Furthermore BELT aims to promote the new label on two key levels: primarily raising awareness and informing consumers (citizens but also public and business procurement staff) thus allowing them to make better and more informed choices; and secondly helping manufacturers, distributors and retailers to adapt their practices and use the rescaled labels to push innovation in designing energy efficiency products. BELT will create targeted communication campaigns for all stakeholders, it will organise workshops and events and it will develop training activities. The excellence of BELT relies on its multidisciplinary expertise and geographical coverage able to reach 20,000,000 million European consumers and 5000 market actors. BELT goes beyond its five primary target countries (Spain, Portugal, Italy, Belgium and Slovenia). It is going to have in fact an impact in other four secondary target countries (Ireland, Croatia, Greece and Lithuania) and at European level thanks to the support of retailers and manufacturers’ associations as well as members of the consortium as BEUC and ICLEI.

EVERPV’s objective is to provide EU with efficient solutions for a sustainable treatment of end-of-life PV panels and recovery of high purity and high integrity materials. Based on the grinding of PV panels waste from the backside and/or the use of IR lamps heating, EVERPV will demonstrate two innovative technologies to delaminate the different layers of the PV panel. Combined with recycling processes, it will enable to recover glass with less than 1% impurities, encapsulant and backsheet polymers with a purity over 99%, and silver with a purity of 99%. Besides, the project will cluster with other EU-funded consortia already addressing the recycling of silicon (e.g. PHOTORAMA) to provide with a global solution. The new delamination technologies will be respectively demonstrated at ENVIE recycling plant and at 9TECH to reach TRL7. The technology demonstrated during EVERPV project targets to process more than 3000 tons of solar panels per year, thus recovering enough raw materials recovered to produce more than 350 000 new panels per year by 2030. EVERPV will finally demonstrate the potential for reusability of recovered materials in several industrial value chains in particular in the PV industry. The project will lead a strategic analysis on the potential of new EoL panels circular value chains based on estimated PV waste generation together with environmental and societal impact assessments. EVERPV has gathered a consortium of 16 participants from 8 countries whose expertise ranges from solar PV materials and recycling processes (CEA, CSEM, ENEA, TEC), recyclers (ENVIE, 9TECH), process industries and materials suppliers (SGB, DTF, DPL, JBR), PV modules manufacturing (VAL), collecting and waste treatment organizations (SOREN, ERION), policy-making, business and training facilitators (SPE, UNITAR, BI).

The overall objective of NONTOX is to increase the recycling rates of plastics waste containing hazardous substances by developing and optimising recycling processes to produce safe and high quality secondary plastic materials and by optimising the overall process economics by integration. Increasing recycling rates is crucial for the implementation of a circular economy as clearly stated in the EU Plastic Strategy. NONTOX focuses on the removal of hazardous and undesired substances from plastic waste taking into account the whole value chain: sorting and pre-treatment techniques, recycling technologies but also post-treatment techniques. Valorisation of by-products and removed substances is also considered to enhance potential applications. NONTOX will target material recovery of plastics originating from WEEE, ELV and C&DW streams containing hazardous additives or undesired compounds such as flame-retardants, stabilizers, fillers, etc. Main secondary plastic outputs will include for example, ABS, EPS, PS, HIPS, PE, PP. The market for these polymers is massive as together they represent about half of the EU demand for plastics and yet a significant portion of these valuable plastics is landfilled or incinerated. NONTOX will further develop two different technologies (Extruclean and CreaSolv®) to remove hazardous substances from aforementioned plastic waste streams, allowing for increased recycling rates. NONTOX will also improve knowledge and state of the art concerning pre-treatment and sorting of plastic waste containing hazardous substances. Thermochemical conversion of non-target plastics and side streams from the main recycling processes will be investigated to increase system efficiency by integration and widen the range of final products and applications. NONTOX is conceived by a multidisciplinary consortium including internationally renowned RTOs, universities, key industrial partners and recyclers as well as product design experts.