The Blue Bioeconomy defined as ‘the production and conversion of renewable marine biological resources into value added products, such as food, feed, bio-based products and bioenergy’ entails a large set of opportunities for European coastal communities. Innovative business models based on circularity; short-chains, digital solutions and ecosystem contributions offer the chance to stabilize and create new enterprises and jobs also for the lower-educated; while transforming remote, rural areas also into interesting, revitalized, climate-friendly places to live. However, blue bioeconomy actors struggle with challenges related to technology, lack of knowledge & skills or regulatory barriers. BlueBioClusters brings together 12 support organizations from across Europe, all of them highly engaged in their 9 regions in assisting start-ups, companies and policy makers to make best use of innovations. They have joined forces to improve, develop and implement new support tools and methods based on systematic collection, benchmarking and joint knowledge creation on *blue biobased value chains, practice cases and incentives, WP2; *ecosystem service valorization, WP3; *technology needs, identification and transfer of solutions, WP4; *start-ups/SMEs; experts and support mechanisms (coaching; co-creation), WP5; as well as *‘Communities of Practices’, to foster long-term stakeholder cooperation within and across the regions; WP6. While we expect to create long-lasting impact already within the project lifetime by engaging with hundreds of actors within our regions to stimulate collaboration and actions for change; activities are designed to be continued post-project, being also open for other Blue Regions, clusters and individual companies to join. To that end, the inter-active BlueBioCluster platform will not only serve as a repository of the projects’ outputs in terms of stakeholders and services, but is set up in such way, that it will be continuously updated and maintained by and with its users also post-project.

The WASTELESS project will develop and test a mix of innovative tools and methodologies for Food Loss and Waste (FLW) measurement and monitoring. A bottom-up approach will be followed: starting from defining an harmonised methodological framework and set of standards for the testing activities, the evaluation of the tools implementation and the quality and integrability of the data produced in other frameworks and finally recommend sustainable policies and business strategies to set the ground for a harmonised Framework at EU level. Additionally to the measurement and monitoring tools, WASTELESS will carry research activities on innovative processes and streams to valorise unavoidable FLW. With the ambition to make existing FLW quantification solutions and WASTELESS ones usable by all food actors, it will be developed a Decision Support Toolbox for any stakeholders to access to the most appropriate methodology, digital tools and solutions for FLW valorisation all that aggregated with the Environmental and Socio-Economic impact associated to the implementation of the solutions. This will enable the replication of data collection hubs accross Europe feeding the model developed by JRC with robust, reliable and comparable FLW data.