Fabric softeners are the most popular laundry care products after detergents. They keep clothes soft, enhance nice smells while preventing musty odours, extend the life of clothes, reduce the formation of wrinkles and improve endurance ability of clothes against stains. However, existing fabric softeners are usually inefficient and contain harmful toxic ingredients that are bad for environment and human health. In a laundry cycle, 95% of softeners are lost in water during the draining process, generating excessive impact on the environment. The remaining 5% of softener remains on clothes for only a short time, before slowly releasing the chemical substances on to skin and the environment. CARINSA has developed an eco-friendly polymeric coating that microencapsulates fragrances and drastically improves fabric softener efficiency. The fabric softeners produced with our technology do not contain toxic materials, increase the adherence to fabric in the washing process by up to 10 times and will improve softener duration on clothes by up to 330%. ECO-SOFT project represents a huge opportunity for our company (CARINSA) to commercialise an innovative solution that will benefit the whole fabric softener value chain. Our solution, CARINCAP, allows fabric softener manufacturers to increase their gross margin by 30% while final consumers will benefit from an eco-efficient, safe laundry care product that has reduces cost per wash by 61%. CARINSA has 24 years of experience in the market and is already present in more than 50 countries. We plan to commercialise the technology among fabric softener manufacturers by exploiting our experience in the sector and by using our present channels, which make this project strategically important for the company. Initial market projections suggest that CARINSA will gain about €6M of net profit in 2024 while directly creating 30 new jobs.

According to Eurostat, the agricultural sector is by far the biggest producer of the residual biomass in Europe, annually generating ca. 400 million tonnes (Mt) of dry agricultural waste. This residual biomass is usually either utilized for low value applications (compost or animal feed) or have to be deactivated to be safely disposed. On the other side, this residual biomass is highly rich in various bioactive compounds (oils, fatty acids, polyphenols, proteins) which could be used to improve the human health and wellbeing but usually lost for high-value applications due to the lack of comprehensive technology to effectively extract and preserve the bioactives. Among the natural bio-based compounds, polyphenols is the biggest class of bioactives with a range of beneficial properties for human health which have not be utilized for their full potential. PHENOLEXA project proposes to unlock the potential of polyphenols-rich agri-side streams (olive, grape shoots and leaves, chicory and onion residues) to procure bioactive compounds of high value via the development of cascade smart biorefinery which combines pretreatment of the biomass with benign environmentally friendly green solvents extraction technology. PHENOLEXA will focus on the processing of several types of agri and biowaste to create a pool of new functional polyphenolic bioactives with the tuned functionality (anticancer, antiviral, anti-oxidant, antimicrobial, antifungal, anti-inflammatory) whereas the remaining fibres and colorants will be utilised in functional foods. PHENOLEXA will demonstrate the technology of the bioactive ingredients procurement at TRL4/5 and will create lab scale prototypes of cosmetic, nutraceutical, pharma and functional food products with their proved efficacy by the end of the project. PHENOLEXA will also validate the techno-economic feasibility and environmental sustainability of the proposed biorefinery.

Food business is the first sector in terms of employment in Europe, 90% of food companies being SMEs (majority of them being micro enterprises). Though innovation is the main leverage to improve competitiveness, there is neither high enough innovation and entrepreneurship spirit nor innovation transfer from High Education Institutes (HEI) to business. The partners of this consortium, involved for years in initiatives aiming at fostering innovation and interactions between students and industry on the basis of project-based learning approach, identified limits of the current training approaches. The project performance will be notably assessed against the generation of new products or processes and the creation of value and long term collaborations. For this purpose, it will create a European FoodBusiness Transfer Laboratory that will centralize new educational content and tools to foster stimulate entrepreneurship entrepreneurial skills and will allow constructive interactions between HEIs and foodbusiness stakeholders. Supported by a shared web-platform allowing multidisciplinary knowledge exchanges between the partners, this project will also produce best practices for entrepreneurship development, new learning and teaching approaches in closer contact with industry, etc. Taken together, FOODLAB project’s results will homogenize educational approaches; improve interactions between academia and industry; develop entrepreneurship spirit; foster innovation and competences transfer; promote integration of young graduated in SMEs. Ultimately this project will be the basis of competitiveness improvement in food SMEs and bigger companies. It will also help to maintain and increase employment in food sector and possibly in other sectors, as the present project is designed to allow transfer of methodology and best practices in training to other sectors.

On average, each European citizen produces approximately 200 kg of municipal biowaste per year, representing between 118 and 138 million tonnes of biowaste annually arising in the EU. The main municipal biowaste management systems currently existing in Europe represent one-way flow systems in which materials and resources are underused, limiting its potential recovery into high-value products. VALUEWASTE proposes an integrated approach in urban biowaste upcycling for the production of high-value biobased products, developing the first complete solution to fully valorise biowaste that can be replicated across Europe. We will implement three new value chains that will use urban biowaste as raw material for its valorisation into high-value end products in a cascading process, generating economic, social and environmental benefits: food & feed proteins and other ingredients, and biobased fertiliser. VALUEWASTE will be developed at two very different European locations, Murcia (ES) and Kalundborg (DK) with the purpose of finding a solution both technical and socially adapted to the different socio-economic contexts exiting across Europe. Social initiatives will be created to increase consumer awareness and acceptance of urban biowaste-derived products. End-user products applications and new market opportunities will be demonstrated. Outcomes of the project will contribute to new standardisation, and will be useful information for EU policy makers in terms of waste management and in the adoption of new policies.