TREASoURcE: The treasure in resources
FinEst Centre is happy to share the news that we have a new Horizon Europe grant – TREASoURcE, led by VTT from Finland. The project is estimated to start by autumn of 2022 and the main focus of the project activities are in the field of Circular Economy.
More precisely, TREASoURcE deals with implementing circular economy practices for plastics, batteries and biobased side and waste streams to take the participating regions and their citizens to the forefront of climate neutrality and circularity.
TREASoURcE will innovatively circulate by refurbishment, reuse and recycling currently burned, exported, landfilled or dumped CEAP-listed plastic, batteries and biobased side and waste streams by deploying systemic circular economy (CE) solutions. The systemic CE solutions integrate the two main elements of TREASoURcE: stakeholder engagement demonstrations and key value chain demonstrations.
TREASoURcE focuses on demonstrating the CE solutions in cities, regions and their groupings located in the Nordics (Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark), and they will be replicated in the Baltics (Estonia, Lithuania), Poland and Northern Germany. All of these countries are part of the Baltic Sea Region. The combination of the cities and regions will enable large reach and bigger impact and boost the replicability and scalability potential of the circular economy solutions. A common issue of the regions’ material circulation is lower and decentralised material volumes. This results in feasibility challenges and high-risk investments due to challenges in securing sufficient feedstock (quality, quantity). However, regional strengths lie in ambitious climate and environmental targets. The Nordic region has a population of over 27 mil., and forms the 12th largest economy in the world, together with Baltics, Poland and Northern Germany the population is over 62 mil. The Nordics have a long history of collaborating and are frontrunners in circular economy – the contribution that can be made together with knowledge transfer and replication to accelerate the transition to circular economy is big. The Nordics are known for their active approach, which is supported by ambitious national climate neutrality, but also for the eagerness to collaborate and share knowledge. There is also a long history in collaborating with the Baltic countries. The countries individually are quite small (populations, markets), but together form large markets and can facilitate feasible waste material circulation.