H4C Europe project will create a European Community of Practice (ECoP). It will provide a community, knowledge platform, and exchange structures that will help the existing and future hubs in creation, management, and growth, by overcoming barriers to IS/I-US/C. The ECoP is set up to be self-sustaining. 10 existing Hubs have committed to join as ECoP Founding Members. The ECoP will preserve the findings of IS/I-US/C research and innovation projects, especially those funded by the EC and member states. It will organize a continuous exchange of ideas and best practices and facilitate in-depth exchanges between experts to identify bottlenecks, evaluate the outcomes of related projects, and propose innovative approaches to overcome bottlenecks. Possible topics include the financing and operation of IS infrastructures, matching demand and supply in IS and I-US, sharing benefits, cross-border exchange of materials, water, and waste-water systems, regulatory issues in the use of secondary raw materials, the tension between re-use and use of waste as feedstock, to name a few. Digitalization is a transversal enabling aspect of IS/I-US/C and the usage of digital tools will be an important aspect of each expert group. In line with the call and to achieve its vision, the CSA will work along four axes: 1) Sustainable Community building and establishment of an IT knowledge platform as a tool, 2) Consolidation and creation of available knowledge by analysis of the state of the art, in-depth discussions of leading experts, and field trials of business models and financial strategies a.o. for large-scale demonstrators, 3) Development of a KPI toolkit for the assessment of the maturity of IS/I-US/C regional initiatives towards H4C and independent evaluation of H4Cs as candidates for lighthouse projects, as well as the elaboration of policy recommendations, 4) Promotion of the H4C concept, societal engagement, and policy recommendations.

This project aims to provide for real-world implementations of Water Framework Directive (and other water related legislation), as well as the Circular Economy and EU Green Deal packages by showcasing and validating innovative next generation water resource solutions at pre-commercial demonstration scale. These solutions combine WATER management services with the recovery of value added renewable resources extracted/MINED from alternative water resources ("WATER-MINING"). The project will integrate selected innovative technologies that have reached proof of concept levels under previous EU projects. The value-added end-products (water, platform chemicals, energy, nutrients, minerals) are expected to provide regional resource supplies to fuel economic developments within a growing demand for resource security. Different layouts for urban wastewater treatment and seawater desalination are proposed, to demonstrate the wider practical potential to replicate the philosophy of approach in widening circles of water and resource management schemes. Innovative service-based business models (such as chemical leasing) will be introduced to stimulate progressive forms of collaboration between public and private actors and access to private investments, as well as policy measures to make the proposed water solutions relevant and accessible for rolling out commercial projects in the future. The goal is to enable costs for the recovery of the resources to become distributed across the whole value chain in a fair way, promoting business incentives for investments from both suppliers and end-users along the value chain. The demonstration case studies are to be first implemented in five EU countries (NL, ES, CY, PT, IT) where prior successful technical and social steps have already been accomplished. The broader project consortium representation will be an enabler to transferring trans-disciplinary project know-how to the partner countries while motivating and inspiring relevant innovations throughout Europe.

IbD® will create a holistic platform for facilitating process intensification in processes in which solids are an intrinsic part, the cornerstone of which will be an intensified-by-design® (IbD). The IbD approach is hinged on the use of robust data about a process to ‘redesign’, modify, adapt and alter that process in a continuous, intensified system, and will be the new paradigm in the intensification of processes based on statistical, analytical and risk management methodologies in the design, development and processing of high quality safe and tailored chemicals, pharmaceuticals, minerals, ceramics, etc. under intensified processes. The IbD Project will deliver the EU process industry with an affordable and comprehensive devices-and-processes design-platform endeavoured to facilitate process intensification (PI), which specially targets -but is not limited to- solid materials processing. Five PI industry case studies will be implemented in mining, ceramics, pharmaceutical, non-ferrous metals and chemical processes using the IbD approach and to validate the IbD methodologies, tools, PI modules, control and fouling remediation strategies and the ICT Platform itself for the industrial implementation of PI in processes involving solids. The Platform includes design modules for the commonest intensified reactors-Rotating fluidized beds, micro-structured reactor and spinning disk, among others, as well as a generic Module Builder -equipped with a set of both proprietary and third-parties design tools- for designs carried out on the basis of radically novel ideas. The IbD Platform output is basically a data set that comprises the intensified reactor design -ready to be built or assembled-, an optimised whole process design including the upstream/downstream intensified unit operations and their solids handling capability, as well as cleaning methods, etc. and the expected economic and environmental quantitative impacts.