Increasing industrial uptake of project findings is at the heart of project SPRING. It is the essential building block for ensuring greater impact of SPIRE projects and therefore progress towards the SPIRE roadmap goals of increased resource and energy efficiency in the EU process industries. Instead of focusing on a small cluster of projects, SPRING has been developed to provide the mechanism to enhance the impact of all SPIRE projects. Project SPRING’s objective is to increase progress towards the SPIRE goals and enhance return on investment in projects by addressing the needs of those who make the decisions to adopt process innovations in industry and barriers to their adoption. It will do this by providing guidance to project participants, decision makers in industry and broader SPIRE stakeholders, enabling them collectively to: 1. Improve the articulation of the value of project exploitable outputs 2. Improve the articulation of industry needs and barriers-to-uptake of exploitable outputs 3. Improve the mapping of project value to industry needs 4. Identify policy gaps and recommendations to improve project impact To address these objectives, the project will deliver six sets of exploitable outputs: A – Guidance on best practice of how to measure progress, impact and success of SPIRE projects. B – Frameworks for getting different levels of project results to the right audience through the spire2030.eu portal C – A model for mapping project outputs to industry needs, through thematic, interactive industry workshops, expert input and technology scanning methods. D – Guidance for understanding business barriers to uptake, including best practice for enabling good decision making when evaluating project outputs. E – A package of training and network groups to upskill SPIRE project participants F – Identification of policy gaps and future SPIRE needs

The SPIRE Roadmap calls for an industry-focused study of current sustainability assessment approaches across the process industries, with the aim of identifying and promoting a suitable ‘toolkit’. Project STYLE is an industry-led consortium representing a broad spread of process industry sectors with numerous products that cross sector boundaries through their value chains. Partner organisations (Britest, ArcelorMittal, Carmeuse, Holcim, RDC Environment, IVL, Solvay, Tata Steel, Utrecht University and Veolia) bring together a wealth of knowledge and experience in the use of tools for sustainability assessment. Active stakeholder engagement/support from public and private sector organisations, national standardisation bodies and industry associations from project inception, will ensure focus and clarity in addressing the challenges identified in the call. Project STYLE has three key objectives, to: 1. Identify best practice in sustainability evaluation, across sectors and through value chains via inventory and classification of established approaches. 2. Test and deliver a practical toolkit for sustainability evaluation of processes and products, spanning multiple sectors and easily usable by non-practitioners of LCA. 3. Determine gaps, through critical assessment and validation, and identify future research needs to improve the toolkit and ensure broad applicability across sectors. Industrial partners in the project will provide the cross-sectoral case study opportunities for testing existing partner tools and selected tools identified through the inventory and classification stages. The research and consultancy partners will ensure that the project methodology is rigorous, sufficiently wide-ranging and that recommendations are validated and consistent with the best world-wide standards. Dissemination of project outputs via and in collaboration with the stakeholder groups will promote uptake and increase the EU knowledge base for sustainability evaluation.

Plastics bring unprecedented value in terms of convenience, versatility of design and lightweight to European consumers as well as increasingly advanced performances even in high end applications. But only 31% of plastic packaging are currently recycled due to infra-developed technologies or to their unsatisfactory economic viability. This is in fact aggravated by considering plastics as commodity where their economic value is linked to a single use, often not taking into account the potentially generated end of life hurdles. In line with the just released Plastic Strategy for Europe, the time has come to stop the depletion, landfilling and incineration and shift to a Circular Model in the plastic sector improving the recycling rate but also the value of secondary raw materials from plastic recycling. As such, with an overarching mission to maximise the valorisation of our finite plastic resources, based on the CreaSolv® process (CreaSolv® is a registered trademark of CreaCycle GmbH) patented by the partner FRAUNHOFER, which will be upscaled and digitased, MultiCycle will deliver an industrial recycling pilot plant for thermoplastic-based multi-materials. This is a solvent based selective extraction process which allows recovering pure plastics in mixed wastes but also fibres without downgrading. The later compounding of recovered materials will also be optimised in terms of process and formulation. Our economically and environmentally sustainable MultiCycle process will be demonstrated in 2 main large volume sectors (as providers of waste to recycle and end users of the recycled materials): -Multilayer packaging but also flexible films that cannot be recycled cost effectively to date and altogether account for around 50% of plastic packaging, i.e. ca. 10 millions tons/year in EU. -Fibre reinforced thermoplastic composites for the automotive sector from which plastics constitute around 16% of End-of-Life Vehicles weigth, i.e. ca. 1 million tons/year in EU.