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Objective: The recycling business is traditionally dominated by SMEs. In the last 5 years a general trend in the electronics recycling sector to bigger companies is very visible. Multinational, multi-sector companies are buying several smaller recyclers every year. Hence the previous project HydroWEEE (03/200902/2012) dealt with the recovery of rare and precious metals from WEEE. The idea has been to develop a mobile plant using hydrometallurgical processes to extract metals like yttrium, indium, lithium, cobalt, zinc, copper, gold, silver, nickel, lead, tin in a high purity. By making this plant mobile several SMEs can benefit from the same plant. By making the processes universal several fractions (lamps, CRTs, LCDs, printed circuit boards and Li-batteries) can be treated in the same mobile plant in batches. This reduces the minimum quantities and necessary investments. In addition these innovative HydroWEEE processes produce pure enough materials that can be directly used for electroplating and other applications. The objective of HydroWEEE Demo is to build 2 industrial, real-life demonstration plants (1 stationary and 1 mobile) in order to test the performance and prove the viability of the processes from an integrated point of view (technical, economical, operational, social) including the assessment of its risks (incl. health) and benefits to the society and the environment as well as remove the barriers for a wide market uptake. Finally the previously developed processes of extracting yttrium, indium, lithium, cobalt, zinc, copper, gold, silver, nickel, lead, tin will be improved and new processes to recover additional metals which are still in this fractions (Cerium, Platinum, Palladium, Europium, Lanthanum, Terbium, ) as well as the integrated treatment of solid and liquid wastes will be developed. Summarized HydroWEEE Demo will boost European competitiveness by applying novel processes for improved resource efficiency by extracting rare and precious metals.
Objective: The poor condition of sanitation and wastewater management in India (as in many Asian countries) is well documented and has recently led the Asian Development Bank to call for a revolution in wastewater management across Asia. Conventional, centralized approaches have failed in many areas and will hardly be able to solve potential problems in rural, hilly and rapidly developing urban areas in India. Instead, innovative, decentralised systems aiming at various benefits are needed. A main benefit in the context of SARASWATI is the reuse of treated wastewater for different purposes. Other benefits include reuse of energy and nutrients, which are also important. Despite the overall poor condition of wastewater treatment across South Asia, India has already considerable experience with such decentralised approaches. Over the last decade, hundreds of decentralised wastewater treatment plants of different technology types have been installed all over India. However, not all are functioning well and several also failed, due to various reasons. Also, there is no consolidated evaluation and review of all those existing plants available. As a result there is only very limited knowledge on the performance of those existing technologies available and a review and evaluation of those plants is very timely in order to derive sound conclusions and recommendations for future wastewater management strategies in India. SARASWATI will perform such a comprehensive and independent evaluation and hence provide key suggestions for the improvement of existing technologies. In addition, SARASWATI aims at deploying selected proven EU technologies with a potential for solving grave water challenges in India (water pollution due to discharge of untreated wastewater and storm-water, water scarcity and groundwater depletion, unhygienic sludge handling practices due to lack of suitable technologies). Water challenged sites have been identified in 5 Indian States comprising almost all regions.
The Clean Hydrogen in European Cities (CHIC) Project is the essential next step to full commercialisation of hydrogen powered fuel cell (H2FC) buses. CHIC will reduce the 'time to market' for the technology and support 'market lift off' 2 central objectives of the Joint Undertaking. CHIC will: - Intensively test the technology to generate learning for the final steps towards commercialisation by operating 28 H2FC buses in medium sized fleets in normal city bus operation and 10 fuel cell passenger cars, and substantially enlarging hydrogen infrastructure in 5 European regions. - Embed the substantial knowledge and experience from previous H2FC bus projects (CUTE & HyFLEET:CUTE). - Accelerate development of clean public transport systems in 14 new European Regions. - Conduct a life cycle based sustainability assessment of the use of H2FC buses in public transport, based on a triple bottom line approach considering environmental, economic and social aspects. - Identify the advantages, improvement potentials, complementarities and synergies of H2FC buses compared with conventional and alternative technologies - Build a critical mass of public support for the benefits of 'green' hydrogen powered transport, leading to increased visibility and political commitment across Europe. The project is based on a staged introduction and build-up of H2FC bus fleets and the supporting infrastructure across Europe. A phased approach will link experienced and new cities in partnerships, greatly facilitating the smooth introduction of the new systems now and into the future. With this arrangement the project will be linked to projects fully funded from other sources and therefore magnifies the impact of the JTI. In the context of the H2FC bus projects and progress achieved to this point, the expected results of CHIC will take the technology to the brink of commercialisation, leading in turn to very significant environmental & economic benefits to Europe and to the World.
Objective: Human use and exploitation of the biosphere is increasing at such a pace and scale that the sustainability of major ecosystems is threatened, and may not be able to continue to function in ways that are vital to the existence of humanity. Re-framing environmental resource use has led to the emergence of the concepts of ecosystem services (ES) and natural capital (NC). This discourse indicates not only a change in our understanding of planetary functions at the ecosystem scale, but also a fundamental shift in how we perceive the relationship between people and the ecosystems on which they depend. OPERAs (OPERATIONAL POTENTIAL OF ECOSYSTEMS RESEARCH APPLICATIONS) aims to improve understanding of how ES/NC contribute to human well-being in different social-ecological systems in inland and coastal zones, in rural and urban areas, related to different ecosystems including forests and fresh water resources. The OPERAs research will establish whether, how and under what conditions the ES/NC concepts can move beyond the academic domain towards practical implementation in support of sustainable ecosystem management. OPERAs will use a meta-analysis (systematic review) of existing ES/NC practice to identify knowledge gaps and requirements for new policy options and instruments. New insights, and improved or novel tools and instruments, will be tested in practice in exemplar case studies in a range of socio-ecological systems across locales, sectors, scales and time. Throughout this iterative process, available resources and tools will be brought together in a Resource Hub, a web-based portal that will be co-developed by scientists and practitioners representing different interests and perspectives on the development, communication and implementation of the ES/NC concepts. The Resource Hub will provide the main interface between OPERAs and a Community of Excellence (CoE) for continued practice that will benefit from OPERAs outcomes.
Objective: Integrated assessment and energy-economy models have become central tools for informing long-term global and regional climate mitigation strategies. There is a large demand for improved representations of complex system interactions and thorough validation of model behaviour in order to increase user confidence in climate policy assessments. ADVANCE aims to respond to this demand by facilitating the development of a new generation of integrated assessment models. This will be achieved by substantial progress in key areas where model improvements are greatly needed: end use and energy service demand; representation of heterogeneity, behaviour, innovation and consumer choices; technical change and uncertainty; system integration, path dependencies and resource constraints; and economic impacts of mitigation policies. In the past, methodological innovations and improvements were hindered by the unavailability of suitable input data. The ADVANCE project will make a large and coordinated effort to generate relevant datasets. These datasets, along with newly developed methodologies, will be made available to the broader scientific community as open-access resources. ADVANCE will also put a focus on improved model transparency, model validation, and data handling. A central objective of ADVANCE is to evaluate and to improve the suitability of models for climate policy impact assessments. The improved models will be applied to an assessment of long-term EU climate policy in a global context, and disseminated to the wider community. The ADVANCE consortium brings together long-standing expertise in integrated assessment and energy-economy modelling with a strong expertise in material flows, energy system integration, and energy service demand.
Objective: COBWEB will leverage the UNESCO World Network of Biosphere Reserves (WNBR). Concentrating initially on the Welsh Dyfi Biosphere Reserve, we will develop a citizens observatory framework, and then validate the work within the context of the UK National Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) and internationally, within the WNBR; specifically, within Greek and German Reserves. The infrastructure we develop will exploit technological developments in ubiquitous mobile devices, crowd-sourcing of geographic information and the operationalising of standards based SDI such as the UK Location Information Infrastructure. It will enable citizens living within Biosphere Reserves to collect environmental information on a range of parameters including species distribution, flooding and land cover/use. A main driver will be the opportunity to participate in environmental governance. Data quality issues will be addressed by using networks of people as sensors and by analysing observations and measurements in real-time combination with authoritative models and datasets. The citizens observatory framework will integrate with evolving INSPIRE compliant national SDIs and allow the fusion of citizen sourced data with reference data from public authorities in support of policy objectives. To maximise impact, COBWEB will work within the processes of the standards defining organisations. Specifically, we will aim to improve the usability of Sensor Web Enablement standards with mobile devices, develop widespread acceptance of the data quality measures we develop and maximise the commercial appeal of COBWEB outputs. The end result we are aiming for is a toolkit and a set of models that demonstrably works in different European countries and which is accepted as a core information system component of the WNBR. Implementations of COBWEB will act as models for how technology may be used to empower citizens associations in environmental decision making.
Objective: The decoupling of economic growth and the growth of transport represents a major objective within the European transport policy. The major contributor to transport growth has to be seen in the increased transport intensity of value creation. On the supply side, the non-optimal utilisation of transport capacities and modes contributes to the growth of transport, for example in the lack of acceptance of inter-modal transport. This has been a major issue for policy makers for many years. In order to get a better understanding of the interrelation between logistics decisions and transport demand, the EC supported a number of research projects, such as SULOGTRA, EUTRALOG and PROTRANS. As a result, substantial scientific evidence has been produced. However, to achieve the Commission objectives, these findings must be translated into the daily operations of shippers and logistics service providers.
Reactive Hydride Composites reveal great potential as hydrogen storage materials as they overcome the thermodynamic limitations hindering the use of light-weight complex hydrides. However, their sorption kinetics is still slow due to the fact that the hydrogen sorption process takes place within complex solid state reactions. It is aim of this project to explore the fundamental mechanisms involved in these reactions. For this, experimental studies on sorption kinetics, thermodynamics, crystal structure and electronic properties of the nano-structured materials are cross-linked to ab-initio calculations and theoretical modelling. The results will provide a basis to improve material properties and to develop new catalysts for hydrogen sorption. Finally, the optimization of synthesis methods and in particular the up-scaling of hydrogen storage materials preparation will be explored in collaboration with manufacturers.
Objective: The European PV market is developing rapidly, with new products and services, new actors and technologies emerging constantly while overall business grows by over 30Prozent a year. During such growth of market and industry it is of particular importance to lay a sound basis of understanding of the quality and performance of products and systems, harmonise procedures for their testing and labelling and disseminate this knowledge to all involved players. Customers, manufacturers and service providers today ask for increased transparency and increased confidence and planning reliability. And they will all benefit from a joint effort on pre-normative research on performance assessment of photovoltaics presented here. The PERFORMANCE project covers all pre-normative as pects from cell to system level and from instantaneous device characterisation and system measurement to their life-time performance prediction and assessment. The limitations of current indoor and outdoor calibration measurement technology will be investi gated and precision will be improved, covering current technologies as well as new and advanced cell and module concepts. Methods will be developed to connect from measurements of module power to module energy production. In a third pillar, methodologies f or the assessment of the life-time performance of PV modules will be developed. Based on all these work packages, a modelling and analysis programme will provide the analytical understanding of PV performance in the broad and systematic manner mentioned ab ove. Following this work programme, PERFORMANCE will produce a consistent set of measurement and modelling methodologies to create the transparency needed for the European market and industry. Next to this significant scientific effort, intense involvement of all European companies along the value chain will be organised systematically through feedback loops. Project results will be fed directly into standardisation processes on CENELEC and IEC level.
Objective: In a deregulated EU rail market monitoring of the vehicle and infrastructure interface is mandatory for enhanced availability of operation reducing costs. Especially when a rolling stock is crossing boundaries between independent infrastructure grids, cond ition monitoring becomes crucial. A monitoring tool on OCLs overhead contact lines - for infrastructure managers is needed for an separate measurement of contact force and surface condition of the vehicle current strip. The rolling stock operator needs a complementary device to measure not only the vertical contact force, but moreover the friction force, in order to analyse the vehicle and OCL interface condition. In SMITS a monitoring system for contact force on the interface current collector lt;- gt; c ontact wire has been developed. A sensor technology has been started to explore showing the potential for an extended range of rail monitoring tools. An innovative coherent sensor technology approach shall be investigated and two independent monitoring too ls for vehicle and infrastructure be developed. These shall be validated at new rail tracks specified for TSI interoperable cross boundary transportation: the Ltschberg Basis Tunnel, CH and the HSL Zuid high speed line, NL, both ready for operation in 2007 . Demonstration tests in operation will be performed along the Korridor X infrastructure passing through different countries rail networks. The outcome of the project will enable managers to specify driving conditions for the usage of their infrastructure to avoid excessive wear improving availability. Complementary rolling stock operators can monitor OCL condition giving them an informative argument in case of damage. Condition-dependent user fees as well as threat of penalty will force vehicle and infrast ructure managers to maintain the vehicle and infrastructure interface on a superior level of availability. The operational costs will be reduced and availability of transportation capacity enhanced.
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