Industrial Symbiosis Platform (IS)

Connecting industry - creating opportunities for fresh innovative solutions

New Innovations and Pathfinders projects for sharing of services, utilities, by-product resources, and raw materials among industries in order to add value, reduce costs and improve the environment.

Introduction

The Industrial Symbiosis Platform supports the roll out of demand-led innovation and enables Europe to proactively identify solutions that address regional priorities and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally, the platform works with business to optimise resource efficiency across the value chain and throughout the material life cycle delivering cross-sectoral innovative Industrial Symbiosis solutions.

One role of the platform is to facilitate the decoupling of resource intake from economic growth as well as economic growth from environmental impact. The platform team works with numerous stakeholders, including academia, entrepreneurs, national and regional authorities, micro enterprises, SMEs and large corporations enabling best practice sharing. Development of educational tools across new and existing hubs and communities round up the activities of the platform.

The platform looks forward to your collaboration in projects which have the potential to make a significant impact on domains such as "The hydrogen economy", "Regional economic development", "Optimisation of cities development", "Optimisation of by-product resources" and "Instilling synergy through models of material, utility or governance sharing". Based on its foundation work, the platform aspires to be regarded by 2016 as a leading force helping European industry move across paradigms, i.e. from material-dependent and product-centric to service-based and resource utility-focused.

Key Areas and Themes

The IS platform encourages proposals for Innovation and Pathfinder projects aligned with one of its three thematic areas:

• Resource Efficiency: Integrating new techniques and technologies into engineering and management including  material function analysis and product vs. service analysis to optimise resource flows, reduce by-product and emission streams
• GHG Reduction & Utilisation: Developing large capabilities on carbon capture and usage and chemical products from CO₂
• Process & Product Redesign: Enhancing of value chains of products and associated resources

Our Portfolio

Innovation Projects: Dream Products – Turning CO₂ into raw material to partly replace petroleum in plastics, MFC-4-CLIMAG – Metropolitan food clusters for climate-proof agriculture by an increased resource use efficiency, Clean-GT – Carbon neutral, low-emission gas turbine using steam injection

Pathfinder Projects: B-COR – Benchmarking the most promising emerging CO₂ reuse technologies, EUR-IS – Examination and application of different business models for IS

CMA Pilot: PRRP – High-quality plastics recyling and reuse platform