DESIRE4EU aims at proving the concept of a radically new sustainable approach to produce, use and recycle electronic printed circuit boards (PCB) that combine technical performance, economic and ecological efficiency throughout their life cycle. The project’s vision is of sustainable, circular PCB manufactured in Europe using bio-based and biodegradable materials. It disrupts current paradigms and significantly reduces harmful waste, enabling fast and ecological copper recovery, above 70wt% of PCB ultimate waste elimination and 1-2% electronics sector CO2 emissions decrease by combining material science, green chemistry, electronics, environmental microbiology, Life Cycle and Value Chain Assessments. Our holistic approach considers boards as a complete system and develops a proof of concept and guidelines for exemplary, fully circular sustainable electronics solutions contributing to European leadership, resilience, and independence. We envision a world-first by 2030: industrially credible, compliant, bio-based, rigid boards, with an innovative and environmentally friendly recycling process for critical metals. DESIRE4EU has 4 SMART specific objectives: (1) The complete assembly of a technology compliant bio-based multilayer PCB, (2) An environmentally friendly and time-efficient bioleaching process, (3) A circular by design approach, materialized by guidelines for further uptake, (4) An advanced, cost-effective but large proof of concept attracting 2000 – 5000 students, responsible citizens and industries, from learners to prosumers. The consortium gathers 8 academic and private partners from 5 European countries, including 2 SMEs and 1 start-up. DESIRE4EU is managed by GINP, represented by Full Professor P. Xavier, who has extensive scientific and management experience. The partners expect at least 7 Open Access articles and 3 patents for this disruptive technology to be exploited in the field of class 2 rigid boards, with a potential market of €436 million.

Digital technology has radically changed the way people work in industry, finance, services, media and commerce and has urged necessary corresponding changes in educational systems. However there is a lack of progress in the education arena. Hence, recent studies show that high percentages of college graduates can't find work, the dropout rate is high and new generations are moving back into their parents homes after school or college. Nevertheless, the digital trend indicates that today's grade-school children will end up at jobs that haven't been invented yet. Nowadays, several studies assure that digital fabrication and making technologies, if coupled with proper learning methodologies such as Constructivism can provide learning experiences that promote young people’s creativity, critical thinking, teamwork, and problem solving skills, which are essential and necessary in the workplace of the 21st century. However, as early as 2008 a OECD report remarked that “technology is everywhere, except in schools”. In addition to this, most uses of technologies in education and training today do not support 21st-century learning skills. In many cases, new technologies are simply reinforcing old ways of training and learning in current school settings and very often they are introduced according to a narrow perception as being suitable only for talented youth or only for Science-, Maths- or Engineering-oriented majors. Current developments call for a move from this elitism to the recognition that fluency with making technologies represents knowledge and skills valuable for every citizen. The eCraft2Learn project will research, design, pilot and validate an ecosystem based on digital fabrication and making technologies for creating computer-supported artefacts. The project aims at reinforcing personalised learning and teaching in science, technology, engineering, arts and math (STEAM) education and to assist the development of 21st century skills that promote inclusion and employability for youth in the EU. The eCraft2Learn ecosystem will support both formal and informal learning by providing the appropriate digital fabrication, making technologies, and programming tools. It will also incorporate mechanisms for personalised and adaptive learning.

Today’s Internet is becoming increasingly centralised, slowing innovation and challenging its potential to revolutionise society and the economy in a pluralistic manner. DECODE will develop practical alternatives through the creation, evaluation and demonstration of a distributed and open architecture for managing online identity, personal and other data, and collective governance in a citizen-friendly and privacy-aware fashion. Strong digital rights that makes it possible for data subjects to determine access rights to their information through flexible entitlements and open standard-based agreements regarding data governance (on the model of Creative Commons licenses) will be woven into the technological architecture. DECODE will increase digital sovereignty of European citizens by enabling them to produce, access and control their data and exchange contextualised information in real-time, and in a confidential, and scalable manner. DECODE will develop a modular privacy-aware IoT hub with a free and open source operating system backed by a state of the art blockchain infrastructure supporting smart-contracts and privacy protections. The architecture will be demonstrated through four pilots in Barcelona and Amsterdam, in the field of digital democracy, citizen sensing, and collaborative economy. The pilots will be run with the active involvement of social entrepreneurs, hackers, and makers. Innovators will be able to build solutions on top of the platform through hackathons and open challenges, while ensuring their security, resilience and privacy preserving qualities. This aims to create a decentralised innovation ecosystem that will attract a critical mass able to shift the current centralised data-driven economy towards a decentralised, sustainable and commons-based economy. DECODE puts agency and data control in the hands of citizens, to improve citizens’ well-being and society for the collective benefit of all.