The flexible packaging materials’ market is forecast to grow at a three percent rate to 2020 – the main drivers including cost and sustainability – while being dominated mainly by PE and PP. The main drawbacks are that PE and PP are not biodegradable and films are difficult to recycle, not to mention multilayer materials. As an alternative, SHERPACK aims at developing an innovative high barrier, renewable, biodegradable and recyclable flexible paper‐based packaging material, that can be easily converted by heat‐sealing and folding, with improved stiffness and grip, in order to replace materials such as plastics or aluminium foil currently used on the market by an advanced biomaterial. The first market targeted is flexible packaging materials for dry food, evaluated at 1.6 million tons per year and 3.7 billion euros (Europe, 2020). A multidisciplinary and complementary consortium of six partners has been set-up for achieving the objectives, including three RTOs and three industrial groups from five European countries. An advisory group consisting of two major end-users, a retailer and a packaging machine manufacturer is also involved to help define requirements and ensure the relevance of the new material with the value chain. The new material relies on three major innovations that will be developed from TRL 3 up to TRL 5: (i) a wet-lamination process used to add a thin layer of fibre specialty on the cellulosic substrate to provide a superb barrier to contaminants and oxygen; (ii) the formulation of a biodegradable polymer waterborne emulsion and its subsequent coating on the substrate to provide excellent heat sealability and barrier to water vapour; (iii) the specific design and application of a grid to improve the specific stiffness and the grip. The three innovations will then be assembled to deliver two proofs-of-concept. Last but not least, all the developments will be assisted by a Life Cycle Assessment to prove their environmental benefit.

SteamDry develops and pilots superheated steam drying technology (SSD) for weblike materials such as paper, board, tissue, and nonwovens. SSD is expected to reduce the consumption of energy radically, leading to 60% energy savings in a drying process, representing ~40% energy savings on the entire production line. It also demonstrates a concept that can lead to CO2 emission-free paper and board manufacturing, and an increase in the share of renewable energy. In a long term, the energy savings potential in Europe is 127 TWh or 6 B€ annually for paper and board manufacturers. In addition to pulp and paper sectors, the developed concepts are expected to be suitable for chemical industry and wood processing applications. Through the developed SteamDry concept, the technology suppliers can increase their market share revenue 230-345 M€ annually in Europe. The global annual energy savings potential is 870 TWh, almost 7x of European energy savings and market potential. The developed solution can be installed on either existing infrastructure or on newbuilt machines with low CAPEX and OPEX creating new opportunities for technology suppliers and savings for the users of this technology. Results ultimately lead to the prosperity of these companies and the CO2-savings targets of the EU. Exploitation potential will be validated through the business cases calculated by technology suppliers and product manufacturers. The piloting of SSD increases knowledge of a) keeping two gas phases, air and steam, separate, b) cleaning superheated steam from biobased particles, c) operating these safely and d) AI-supported advanced control platform. This approach builds on the consortium with strong capabilities to perform the action. The consortium consists of four R&D institutes and two universities - with piloting, technology upscaling, AI, and modeling expertise - two leading technology suppliers and five product manufacturers that are potential end users for the developed technology.

Production of electrical insulation components is globally a B$1.19 business. Cellulose is one commonly used raw material for insulation components. State-of-the-art production methods for high quality electrical insulation products are typically labour intensive and slow. The main objective of NOVUM is to develop and demonstrate a compact and feasible pilot line concept based on novel processing technologies for rapid, design driven production of advanced cellulose-based electrical insulation components. This new pilot line will result in significant efficiency improvement and higher productivity and flexibility, while ensuring lower operational costs as compared with the state-of-the-art process. Manual production will be replaced by an automated manufacturing concept with increased resource efficiency, including 40% reduction in labour time and 60% reduction in waste generation, 20% lower energy consumption and 40% decrease in operating costs. Processing technologies in the focus of NOVUM are 3D printing of cellulose-based materials having thermoplastic features as well as foam forming and thermoforming of cellulose fibres. These three technologies will be developed in parallel to each other, together with the cellulose materials, in order to reach optimal combination for the pilot line concept. Besides technical feasibility, the decision on the pilot line concept will be based on the end use requirements as well as on economic, social and environmental impacts including circular economy considerations. The novel manufacturing concept will also enable exploitation of the full potential of design in generating form and thus novel functionalities to cellulose-based electrical insulation components. In addition, the concept will be based on multipliable technologies, enabling their transition and wide adoption for cellulose-based materials across the process industry and for applications beyond NOVUM for other industrial areas.