The ‘Factories of the Future’ PPP launched in 2008/9 has been a proven success and triggered a unique cooperation between industry, researchers and the European Institutions. The objective of the FoF Impact CSA is to transform the FoF PPP from a research and demonstration programme under FP7 into an innovation programme in Horizon 2020. The FoF-Impact CSA will integrate, in one comprehensive and service-oriented package, a set of tools and measures (guidelines, technology transfer tools and market uptake mechanisms) in support of exploitation of project results generated by the FoF PPP. The FoF-Impact CSA will build upon the existing work, such as the EFFRA Innovation Portal which offers a dynamic community-based environment for sharing and retrieving information about exploitable results. The FoF-Impact CSA will also facilitate collaboration among the main stakeholders which are capable of enhancing the overall impact of the ‘Factories of the Future’ PPP in Horizon 2020 at local and company-level. These actors are: manufacturing industries (large and SMEs), national and regional and other European manufacturing initiatives and programmes (Eureka, Manunet etc); technology transfer organisations and market-uptake experts; industry-focused RTOs and institutes, marketers of exploitable results, potential users of exploitable results, possible investors and business angels. In summary, the FoF Impact CSA will provide tailor-made guidelines and tools (including a FoF-Impact helpdesk) that will service both individual 'Factories of the Future' projects as well as clusters of 'Factories of the Future' projects. The clustering of projects results will be supported both by the existing EFFRA Innovation Portal and through the organisation of specific events, oriented either to technologies, application sectors or specific challenges, and it will thus further stimulate cross-fertilisation and the identification of additional exploitation opportunities.

Polymers are one of the most used materials in different applications, especially in consumer goods like electronics, and the consumption is only expected to rise globally. In Europe, 25,8 million tonnes of plastic waste is generated annually and less than 30 % is collected for recycling and significant shares are exported from EU to be treated elsewhere. Landfilling (31 %) and incineration (39 %) of plastics is high (together 70 %), and by these treatment options the valuable materials are lost from circulation. It is estimated that 95 % of the value of plastic packaging material, between 70-105 billion EUR, is lost annually to the economy after a very short first-use cycle. The industry is lacking standards and main barriers for efficient uptake of recyclates are due to safety concerns, low quality, and recycling rates. PRIMUS activities will increase the resilience of EU's plastic value chains by securing supply of waste plastics as feedstock and increasing its availability through connecting value chain actors, developing methods to control quality, sampling, and analysis, and improving upgrading knowhow and characterize suitability towards added-value products. PRIMUS will prove legislative compliant, privacy-preserving, cost-efficient and feasible technological pathways for tapping into non-recycled or underutilized plastic waste streams. Validated business cases will lower the risks of future investments into European manufacturing capacity. PRIMUS will address one of the core challenges identified in the EU Circular Economy Action Plan, the presence of hazardous substances (brominated flame retardants) and how to effectively and safely debrominate the waste streams for new product use. PRIMUS will contribute to circulating underutilised or non-recycled streams and create further impact by supporting additional production of 0,2 Mtonnes of rHIPS, rPC/ABS, rEPDM and rTPE, which is approximately 6 % of the expected growth of European recyclate market 2018-2024.

The Ren(n)ovates proposal focuses on the deployment and demonstration of an innovative systemic, 4-step holistic approach comprising state-of-the-art renovation with state-or-the-art smart ICT control. Deep renovation of residential buildings will be carried out including the installation of a standardised pre-fabricated energy module equipped with communication technology converting the buildings into Net Zero Energy Buildings. This can be achieved with minimal disturbance to the tenant and with minimal renovation costs for the tenant/building owner by means of an innovative business model. The inclusion of interoperable smart control strategies introduced at building- , cluster- and business level, implemented on existing software platforms and standard compliant serve to ‘unlock’ the residential energy flexibility for grid and system level services. The project addresses the call for Energy-Efficient Buildings (H2020-EeB-2015), more specifically the topic EeB-08-2015 : Integrated Approach to Retrofitting of Residential Buildings.

Present approaches to increasing resource efficiency in manufacturing companies are mainly focused on single process optimisation. A wider and integrated optimisation is assumed to have significantly higher savings potential.In fact, a pilot study has been performed by Greenovate!Europe, showing resource saving potentials of 70% Such a strategy should include optimisation across the interfaces between different steps in complex production chains and different companies involved in the overall value chain In that sense, MEMAN consortium brings together 15 partners from 6 countries represented by industrial enterprises, SMEs mainly, and service companies experts in eco-innovative models, working on improving the competitiveness of the metal mechanic sector, through the full validation of new business models that allow the collaboration of companies in the whole value chain in order to reduce global impacts in terms of energy and other resources MEMAN project will implement an approach to optimise resource efficiency across 3 manufacturing value chains cases, integrating an analytical toolbox based on MEFA and LCA and providing practical decision-making support. Furthermore, new business models will be developed to support the implementation of global energy and resources efficiency along the 3 value chains. Energy characterisations considering the whole value chain, will be also developed within MEMAN The consortium has the capacity and ambition of exploiting and reaching the market with the results of the project, at an international level, in terms of technology and business models. Hence, the technologies developed and the synergies created in the project would have the impact estimated bellow - Energy consumption and CO2 emission reduction for the final product between 20-30% from cradle to gate and between 30-35% from cradle to grave - Product's LCC reduction between 10-20% from cradle to grave The budget and the final requested EC contribution reaches 5.998.686€

Manufacturing industries continuously face the challenge of delivering high-quality products under high production rates while minimizing non value-adding activities. The recent COVID-19 pandemic is causing manufacturers to rethink and reassess their global supply chains and the flexibility of their production sites. Resilience means the ability to withstand difficult situations, while flexibility can be considered as the ability to accommodate changes without incurring significant extra costs. Production processes demanding high human skill such as forming processes, requires readjustment of the process parameters of all production steps as a new product evolves. The deficiencies can be attributed largely to the lack of efficient ways for trusted data sharing among the stakeholders without interoperability barriers. There is a need to be able to determine when such changes lead to deterministic-chaotic behavior with far reaching consequences. FLEX4RES provides an open platform to support production networks' reconfiguration for resilient manufacturing value chains. FLEX4RES will utilize platform-based manufacturing that builds on the state-of-the-art Gaia-X and IDS technologies for data-sharing in the horizontal supply chain and the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) that is to implement intra-factory reconfiguration practices. FLEX4RES considers the Digital Twin of the value-adding network a key enabling technology to achieve reconfiguration processes in highly flexible production systems and networks. The key element of technology linkage is represented by the Self-Descriptions with linked, standardized information models, especially in terms of resilience. The developed platform and specialized hardware aim to improve the existing industry-established lean management approaches related to Reconfiguration Management through the digitalization of the production, characterized as Industry4.0, by allowing for the information sharing between value chain stakeholders.