Agriculture is being managed more tightly than ever before and is generating more data than ever before, but the potential of a data economy in agriculture remains unexplored. The reasons for this are varied, and include technical interoperability, business relationships between stakeholders, and social acceptability issues around data ownership and market transparency. Individual stakeholders make use of the data they generate at their own particular stage in the agri-food supply chain. However, the sharing of this data with others along the chain and its collective analysis needs more development and demonstration if more efficiencies are to be introduced and further value added to the agri-data economy. While some sharing is taking place on an ad-hoc basis, each new set of potential data sharers must start from scratch and work through the same issues common to all such arrangements. Equally, the lack of data sharing precedents in agriculture inhibits data owners from taking a more exploratory view of the world. Several dimensions must be considered in policy-making if a fully functioning data economy in the agriculture domain is to emerge. Such a multi-disciplinary approach is at the core of the DIVINE consortium, which encompasses technical (agriculture and ICT), markets, and social sciences expertise. It will build an agri-data ecosystem that incorporates existing common agri data spaces while deploying industry-led pilots built on data sharing arrangements, to demonstrate the cost-benefit and added value in sharing agri data. DIVINE will assess its ecosystem at the level of policy impacts, the uptake of digital technologies, and economic and environmental performance. DIVINE will promote its ecosystem and its assessments to technology providers, policy-makers, farm representatives, and various other agri-data stakeholders. It will take the first real concrete steps towards mature data markets in European and global agriculture.

Biodegradable alternatives offer a promising solution to plastic pollution and waste littering in the open environment in some specific contexts, as they break down naturally under specific environmental conditions. However, it is often reported that many biodegradable plastics do not fully degrade in their receiving environment. MAGICBIOMAT aims at developing a portfolio of circular bio-based materials with programmed biodegradability demonstrated through 2 applications with highly concerning rates of littering: mulching films and paper-based packaging, tested in open environments conditions (soil, fresh water and marine) and different EU climates. Moreover, MAGICBIOMAT will address circularity by improving the durability of the developed bio-based materials for extending lifespan of products, as well as assessing mechanical recycling, remanufacturing, and reuse. To enable programming of biodegradability of the bio-based materials, MAGICBIOMAT will develop a trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered software to guide the design and manufacturing of novel materials according to applications requirements (properties, manufacturing) and end-of-life needs and conditions, exploiting data from the project material development and biodegradation tests, complemented with open access data. This tool will foster adoption of novel bio-based biodegradable materials by the industry. Prevention of waste littering will also be tackled through consumers’ and end users’ perspective, for which behavioural studies will be carried out to develop interactive labelling and behaviour change strategies that foster user-acceptance of the novel biodegradable materials.

ZeroW has set the ambitious target of playing a key role in the transition of current food systems towards halving Food Loss & Waste (FLW) by 2030 and reaching near-zero FLW by 2050. ZeroW provides significant impacts through the demonstration of innovations in nine real-life food chains, by employing a systemic innovation approach, to effectively address the multidimensional issue of FLW. This involves: (i) pre-identifying systemic innovations, that incorporate multiple interlinked dimensions (process, organisational, strategy, marketing, product, technological, governance, etc.), which are tested and demonstrated; (ii) steering the evolution of innovations towards higher levels of systemic readiness and impact, using a Living Lab co-creation and multi-actor collective learning approach; (iii) enhancing the Living Lab actors’ innovation advancement capability with shared resources facilitating new ways and means of cooperating and co-developing innovations; (iv) developing context-specific trajectories for the systemic innovations (from ideation to scaling-up and commercialisation) leading to the provision of currently missing end products and services that align with consumer attitudes, food actor needs and policy trends. Moreover, ZeroW establishes a clear ‘FLW impact trajectory’, from demonstrator results (2025), scaled up to meet the F2F 2030 goals, and steered through a ‘just transition pathway’ towards a near-zero FLW in 2050.

The textile industry is the fourth largest industry in the world with the global volume of fiber production for textile manufacturing reaching 110 million metric tons in 2020. At the same time, the textile industry is one of the most polluting industries worldwide with the highest greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions corresponding to 10% of the global emissions. Polyester (PET) is the most widely used fibre in the industry, making up 52% of the global market volume. No technology available today is capable of addressing the textile industry’s sustainability and virgin PET produced from primary petrochemical sources remains predominant with a fossil fuel consumption of 98 Mt annually which is expected to reach 300 Mt by 2050. Addressing the key challenges of carbon neutrality, circularity, cost, value chain adaption, and textile properties is the ambition of Threading-CO2, a disruptive project that will demonstrate on an industrial scale a first-of-its-kind technology that converts CO2 waste streams into sustainable PET textiles. Threading-CO2 aims to scale-up and demonstrate its first-of-its-kind technology producing high-quality commercially viable sustainable PET textile products from CO2 waste streams at industrial scale (TRL7) using a circular manufacturing approach and running on renewable energy sources. The overall outcome of the Threading-CO2 project is a 70% GHG emissions reduction compared to existing PET manufacturing processes. In addition, Threading-CO2 will enable the creation of a European value chain for sustainable PET textiles, from feedstock to final textile products in the clothing, automotive and sports/outdoor industries.

DS2 draws researchers and practitioners from diverse disciplines to secure that complex lifecycles of inter-sector data sharing, aggregation and provenance take place in a human-centric and trusted way, with common structures, exportability and insight, whilst protecting the sovereign rights of data owners and complying with European data regulations. DS2 provides a modular software infrastructure to connect data sources (Data Spaces/data silos/data lakes) together for the purpose of cross-sector data sharing. Once connected, data consumers and data providers will be able to structure and execute efficient complex data lifecycles that respect the technical and governance related requirements of the participating data sources. It will do this via an IDT (Intersector DataSpace Toolkit) which is deployed at each data source/space and network connected to any other IDT-enabled data source. The IDT Toolkit is composed of a Broker which manages the fail-safe network operation with no central point of control. Plugged into this is a set of modules for the execution of complex data lifecycles, e.g. filtering, labelling, both automated and catering for where human-in-the loop is required. DS2 will pilot and evaluate its technology using 3 well-defined, inter-sector use cases, (City Scape, Green Deal, Precision Agriculture). The DS2 solution enhances and accelerates the shift towards the data economy by addressing the challenges, pain-points, and requirements with respect to the execution of complex data lifecycle. Data consumers and data providers can now orchestrate, manage and securely execute complex data lifecycles to realize cross-sectorial data driven applications.