Edition no. 11, 2017
Welcome to the  SPIRE Newsletter

Bringing you news, insights and success stories from within and about our  Public-Private Partnership  and the European Process Industry.

In this issue
SPIRE Knowledge Platform: online Brokerage activities








Take a look to SPIRE Knowledge platform and check the area called SPIRE Tools which allows the following online interactions:
  • Creating and sharing your expertise or possible contribution to an existing project proposal
  • Creating and sharing your project ideas
  • Searching for funding programmes relevant to process industries
Whenever an expertise or project idea is introduced on the platform, an automated check is performed within existing submissions of expertise/project ideas and an alert is sent to the author in case they match.   We encourage you to use this tool and hope this will help you finding partners and ideas for your project proposals! 
Projects
INSPIREWATER
Within the INSPIREWATER project 11 partners across Europe aims to enable process industry companies to implement sustainable water treatment solutions as part of a corporate sustainability strategy. This will be achieved via the development, demonstration and exploitation of innovative, eco-efficient technologies which will support sustainable water resources management.
The overall objective is to increase water and raw material efficiency in the process industry through:
  • reduction of water consumption, energy, use of chemicals and waste by using new and established resource-efficient technologies;
  • development of a holistic water management framework which will complement existing management structures in process industry companies.
The project will enable Europe as a leader in green production and the industrial water treatment market and will create new highly skilled jobs in Europe.

VULKANO's more efficient industrial furnaces
Eight countries will be joining forces under the EC-funded VULKANO project coordinated in Spain by CIRCE. The project forecasts a 20% increase in industrial furnace efficiency in steel, ceramics and aluminium sectors, as well as a 27% reduction in the use of fossil fuels.
Energy intensive industries are constantly facing challenges to enhance their process efficiency, reliability and flexibility. This is especially true for processes that involve industrial furnaces due to their high energy consumption rates, placing them under the spotlight of much research to make the whole system more sustainable and competitive.
The VULKANO project aims at designing, implementing and validating innovative solutions, and applying them jointly so as to boost and increase the efficiency, both in terms of energy and the environment, of industrial furnaces supplied by natural gas and of their related processes. The initiative has been allocated close to 7 million euros by the European Commission. During VULKANO's planned three-and-a-half-year duration, CIRCE will be heading up a consortium of 12 partners from Slovenia, France, Italy, UK, Poland, Germany, Turkey and Spain with a view to bolstering Europe's industry.

INSPIRE interviews
INSPIRE develops innovative business models for a selection of complementary sectors that will create flexible networks based on intensified processing enabling more local production in Europe and reverse the delocalization trends. T his will be possible thanks to a clear identification of research and business (including SMEs) needs, followed by the deployment of routes (roadmap) and guideline targeting to measure and assess the performance of such novel models under different possible scenarios under a cost effective and sustainable perspective.

Business cases analysis
For analyzing the current European networks, identifying current practices of delocalization, the opportunities for and barriers against flexibility/delocalization as well as current practices for joint resource management and industrial symbiosis, the project's coordinator plans to conduct interviews among SPIRE projects.
 
Invitation
Among the SPIRE projects several business cases fit into the description promising business models. Therefore SPIRE projects might receive an invitation for an interview at one of the SPIRE upcoming events. 

SAMT Results 
Final results from the SAMT project (SPIRE 2014-04) are presented in a series of reports that are now available on the project website. SAMT stands for Sustainability assessment methods and tools to support decision-making in the process industries.
SAMT Deliverable 3.3 includes a vision, a roadmap and an implementation plan for developing consistent set of sustainability assessment methods for the process industry by 2030. Based on the activities and findings of the SAMT project, the report presents recommendations for future activities, considering potential short term, medium term and long term activities.

Find out more on the SAMT results
CoPro 
In the upcoming 3 years, leading companies, research institutes and universities from eight European countries will jointly work on improving resource and energy efficiency in the process industries by better coordination of production. 
The aim of the CoPro project is to develop methods and tools for better management of industrial plants and chemical parks under dynamically changing market conditions. The goal of the coordination is to save energy and resources and to improve the competitiveness of the European process industries. 

Find out more on the CoPro Project
RESYNTEX 
RESYNTEX, a research project which aims to create a new circular economy concept for the textile and chemical industries, is now in its second year. The project's 20 partners come from across 10 different EU member states and include industrial associations, businesses, SMEs and research institutes. Working together, the group aims to use industrial symbiosis to produce secondary raw materials from unwearable textile waste.
 
Last November, RESYNTEX organized its first Regional Workshop on Waste Mapping in Maribor. Stakeholders from organizations such as the Municipal Office, apparel retailers, charities, private and public waste collectors, but also designers, environmental NGOs and the Chamber of Commerce were all encouraged to discuss critical points in the development of a new circular economy model for textiles. 
The RESYNTEX Focus Group in Maribor is part of a series of four workshops, the next editions being held in Annecy (France) and Prato (Italy).  Running until the end of 2018, RESYNTEX will design a complete value chain from textile waste collection through to the generation of new feedstock for chemicals and textiles.

Find out more on the ResyntexProject!  
TOP-REF project (FP7)
 
The EU-funded TOP-REF project ( Novel resource indicators and tools for competitive and sustainable continuous processing) is developing an innovative new tool that will lead to the substantial improvement of resource efficiency in energy intensive industrial processes within the agro-chemical, chemical and petrochemical industries, with the long-term ambition to expand its results into other industrial sectors. 
With the TOP-REF project due to finish in July 2017, the new tool will be based on new modelling and diagnosis framework that will provide much greater information on the resources performance of the industrial processes that it is targeting. As a result, this tool will allow for better decision-making at the operational level, as well as at design and management level, as well as contribute to the EU's ambitious and overarching sustainability targets.  To successfully measure its impact, the project has developed a detailed set of standardised Key Resource Indicators (KRIs), innovative due to their ability to measure the quantity and quality of all consumed resources (such as water and materials). 

TOP-REF has developed indicators for material efficiency, direct energy consumption, gross water use, net water use and the Resource Exergy Indicator, a novel inclusive indicator of overall resource usage. The KRIs have been defined with a comprehensive scope taking into account the priorities and concerns of the entire EU, from policymakers to citizens, from public authorities to industry. At the end of the project in July 2017, the KRIs will form the basis of new standards or a supplement to existing standards to be used by EU stakeholders. 

TOP-REF is yet to begin its demo phase, where it will be conducting three distinct pilots in the chemistry, refining and fertilizer sectors. As a result of these pilots, the project will refine further its KRIs to maximise their impact

callresults
SPIRE 2017 call results
Initial results for the SPIRE 2017 call have been published. According to the European Commission, 62 proposals were submitted.  The number of proposals received for each topic is:
 
SPIRE-07-2017: 11
SPIRE-08-2017: 11
SPIRE-09-2017: 18
SPIRE-10-2017: 10
SPIRE-11-2017: 2
SPIRE-12-2017: 1
SPIRE-13-2017: 4

IS
A.SPIRE Industrial Symbiosis Workshop
A.SPIRE is organising a members-only Thematic Workshop on Industrial Symbiosis. It will focus on relevant industrial cases and reflect the perspective of the 8 SPIRE sectors: cement, ceramics, chemicals, engineering, minerals, non-ferrous metals, steel and water.
Key topics will include -   What is the role of the process industry in the development of technical and non-technical exchanges?   How can we improve the process industry sustainability and sharing of resources?  What steps are necessary to advance the cross sectorial interaction and understanding of each other's processes?
In addition, four SPIRE projects, EPOS, MAESTRI, SHAREBOX and SYMBIOPTIMA will share with the audience their impact-related findings and methodologies.

A.SPIRE members will receive further information by email
Whitepaper
White paper on the modular plant approach 
A White Paper Modular Plants, written by the temporary ProcessNet working group, gives an overview on current and product cycles in the chemical and pharmaceutical industry.
The authors from industry and academia call for a standardization of both nomenclature and equipment in order to enable a broad application of modularization in process engineering.

Read the white paper
Brochure
2016 projects Brochure 
A.SPIRE Secretariat invites 2016 awarded projects to contribute to the annual projects brochure. 
If not yet done, please provide your contribution as on the text (aim, concept), logo and a visual illustration as soon as possible.

Members
Welcome to our new  A.SPIRE  members

In February 2017, the following organisations joined A.SPIRE:  
 

We warmly welcome them and hope that their  contribution will make our PPP even stronger.   
 
Events
Upcoming events
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