The construction sector is responsible for over 35% of the EU’s total waste generation, and accounts for about 50% of all extracted resources and an estimated at 5-12% of total GHG emissions. WOODCIRCLES will contribute significantly to decreasing these numbers by developing innovative circular solutions for sustainable wood construction to help reduce Europe’s dependence on non-renewable resources, cut GHG emissions, reduce waste generation, and offer long-term carbon sinks and substitution of fossil-based and carbon-intensive products. WOODCIRCLES will combine the considerable innovation power of the expert consortium consisting of key stakeholders from all parts of the value chain to release the full circular and sustainable potential of wood construction. Based on identified needs and market potentials, the consortium will develop new value-added value chains for upcycling of wood waste materials and optimized design-for-disassembly building system solutions to significantly increase recycling rates of wood in construction. An ‘Urban Sawmill’ sorting and production facility capable of turning in-homogenous low value wood construction waste into a standardized homogenous value-added, cost-effective baseline product, will be prototyped. WOODCIRCLES will integrate digital tools and solutions in all developments and create digital twins for the large-scale, real-life demonstrators – the Urban Sawmill and the building system prototypes to demonstrate the benefits of digital technology for circular construction. Active involvement of partner cities and their building ecosystems through technical and thematic co-engagement activities will increase deployment. All developed materials, components and system prototypes will be demonstrated, piloted and fully documented – including sustainability assessment – for immediate market uptake. Based on developments, recommendations for new or updated European harmonised technical specifications and Eurocodes will be provided.

MEZeroE is an EU distributed open innovation ecosystem for: (i) developing nZEB Enabler Envelope technology solutions ; (ii) transferring knowledge; (iii) matching testing needs with existing facilities; (iv) providing monitoring in living labs and; (v) standardizing cutting-edge solutions coming from SMEs and larger industries, to foster inclusive change in the building sector, being accessible via a single-entry point to all users. MEZeroE allows the development of ground-based solutions focused on carbon neutrality and healthy indoor environment, validated with advanced assessment methods and services, recognized protocols and long-term vision to embrace industry 4.0 trends, rapid decision making and customer-centric requirements. MEZeroE accompanies enterprises in adopting the open innovation approach comprising discovery (phase 1), empowering (phase 2), and exploiting (phase 3). MEZeroE will be accessed via a single-entry point web-based multi-side virtual marketplace, including 9 Pilot Measurement & Verification Lines (PM&VL) and 3 Open Innovation Services (OIS) covering training, business model development, systematic IP and knowledge management. MEzeroE will fast-track prototypes to the market as fully characterized products. MEZeroE virtual marketplace provides structured knowledge to different stakeholders with a pragmatic and well-grounded mid to long-term ambition of developing and consolidating a trusted expertise network, to be active and self-sustaining well beyond the project timeline. Based on synergies among partners, existing channels and a dedicated marketing strategy MEZeroE will exploit 3 revenue lines to ensure a 4x leverage factor vs. EU contribution. These revenue streams include: (I) memberships (benefit of web-based platform manager); (ii) consultancy for innovation and IPR protection (benefit of OIS developers) and (iii) incremental revenues of industrial partners (benefit of users) thanks to product transferred to market.

The built environment is ill-prepared for more frequent and increasingly intense climate-related extreme events. These cause severe socio-economic losses and adversely affects public health. Recent scientific and technological advances in the construction industry provide timely solutions for improving the resilience of buildings for specific hazards, but these are often not cost effective or eco-friendly. There is a lack of frameworks for assessing the climate resilience, making it challenging to develop optimal solutions for multi-hazard scenarios. MULTICARE will address this challenge by developing innovative multi-criteria decision-support frameworks and providing plug & play low-carbon resilient technologies for improving the multi-hazard resilience of our built environment in a cost-effective, reliable and sustainable manner. A suite of multi-disciplinary digital services and tools will be developed for multi-hazard resilience assessment, design, operation and management across multiple scales (material, component, building, neighbourhood/district). This will enable stakeholders to make more informed decisions to select materials/solutions and build resilient supply chains, even in case of cultural heritage buildings. We will demonstrate our results in large-scale pilots (3 buildings, 4 neighbourhoods/cities) in different countries with diverse conditions. A user-centred, inclusive and participatory approach will be consistently implemented at all stages of the project for citizens engagement and for extending the durability of MULTICARE impact. To achieve the project goals, MULTICARE combines 21 partners covering the whole technical value chain required for solutions in resilient and sustainable buildings. The Consortium includes experience in social sciences, user engagement and training. The Consortium will support clustering activities with other projects aimed at sharing knowledge, experience, and raising public awareness of climate resilience.

To meet the global and European challenges of reducing the GHG emissions from the construction sector, Build-in-Wood will develop a sustainable and innovative wood value chain for the construction of multi-storey wood buildings. The potential estimated impact from Build-in-Wood is a reduction of GHG emissions of 12.1 MT/year by 2030. Build-in-Wood will, based on experiences from the stakeholders involved in construction of some of the worlds largest wooden multi-storey buildings, take building with wood beyond state of the art. The consortium has identified a strong need for improving the whole value chain and intent to make wood a competitive building material by delivering a fully documented, demonstrated, sustainable and cost effective building system. Build-in-Wood will address this challenge by innovative development of materials and components as well as structural systems and façade elements for multi-storey wood buildings fit for both new construction and retrofitting. Developments will be delivered by means of a dynamic co-created web-based building configurator – the Design Guide – and a complimentary web-based toolbox of documented materials and components. Build-in-Wood will demonstrate full-scale digital case projects for real projects and test system prototypes in operational environments. Active engagement of cities and their building ecosystems through technical and thematic co-creation workshops will strengthen the urban-rural connections. All developed materials, components and system prototypes will be tested, piloted and fully documented for immediate market uptake. Based on developments, recommendations for new or updated European harmonised technical specifications and Eurocodes will be provided. To meet consumer acceptance, regulatory and sustainability requirements, Build-in-Wood includes life-cycle, socio-economic and safety assessments that will guide policy and decision-making at industry and EU level.