Key Enabling Technologies (KET´s) deployment will be the driving force for a significant part of the goods and services that will be available in the market in the next decade. Amongst KET´s, nano-enabled surfaces and membranes must be highlighted due to their huge potential to offer material solutions to address Sustainable Development Goals resulting in positive and sound impacts for the society and key industrial sectors NewSkin aims to create an Open Innovation Test Bed (OITB) to provide the Innovation Ecosystem with the necessary resources and services to uptake a set of game changing, efficient and cost-effective innovative processes to manufacture nano-enabled industrial and consumer products. During the Grant execution the Consortium partners will create an OITB, as well as its structure and procedures establishing a single-entry point, and will validate the OITB capacity to provide services to the I.E executing 165 showcases. After the Grant execution the OITB aims to generate €66.17 million revenues in 5 years creating a €6.7 billion KET market to be absorbed by an end user market of valued at €1 trillion. In 2029, end users markets will obtain economic benefits of about €52.6 billion savings per year mostly devoted to lower energy consumption, increased resources efficiency as well as a reduction of the carbon and volatiles footprint of 184CO2 MT per year and 0.57 MT of VOC’s per year.

Corrosion has been a perennial issue of concern for the metal industries, especially steel. Non-ferrous metal-based coatings are well known pre-treatments but due to environmental concerns and legislations (i.e. REACH), their use has been drastically restricted. The industrial community, pushed by these legislations, has been long demanding an economically viable and eco-friendly pre-treatment coating alternative, without having to compromise on the durability and corrosion performance of the overall coating system. With its outstanding properties, graphene appears as a promising alternative for non-ferrous metals in the coating market, having the potential to provide corrosion protection even when applied in thicknesses of a few nanometers. But the new graphene industry faces still crucial challenges, mainly production cost, quality and consistency. Our company, Carbon Waters, has developed a unique, patented, extremely controllable technique of chemical super-exfoliation to produce GRAPHENE WATER, which consists on dispersing few-layer graphene in water, without using additives and at a competitive cost. Its advantages face to competitors are unprecedented: our high-quality graphene dispersion allows for a stabilized, safe, homogeneous effect on the treated surfaces, ensuring optimum performance. Within this project, we aim to bring our current developments on graphene based anti-corrosive coatings to industrial applications and market readiness (TRL9). With GRAPHENE WATER, Carbon Waters will provide to the EU metal industries an eco-friendly alternative for surface protection, allowing them to commit with the regulatory framework without jeopardizing cost-competitiveness. Exploiting this technology, we aim to become a reference in the field of carbon-based nanomaterial products with expected income reaching €27.7 million cumulated revenues and +40 additional staff by 2025.

MACRAMÉ’s Central Objective is to: • detect, characterise and quantify Advanced Materials during their processing and product-life-cycle (incl. recycling/end-of-life) to assess (e.g. ecotox-/tox-test) the resulting impact on (human) health and the environment if/when they pose (intended or unintended) exposures to humans and/or the environment and to • advance (i.e. prepare for standardisation & harmonisation/’regulatory validation’) the wide-spread applicability and application of the developed test- and characterisation methods, by demonstrating their effectiveness and efficiency in the context of existing, market-relevant industrial materials, processes and products. In alignment with the EU strategies to secure the safety and sustainability of enabling and emerging technologies (incl. those based on chemicals and materials, as addressed in the EU’s Chemical Strategy for Sustainability (2020), and in the European Green Deal (2021)), the MACRAMÉ Project focusses on the development of methodologies that are applicable to ‘Advanced Materials (AdMas)’ - a categories that includes, but surpasses that of ‘nanomaterials’ (EU, ‘Definition of a Nanomaterial’), and that is aligned with the future-oriented innovation, safety and sustainability considerations at the OECD (OECD (2020)), the EU (EU (2022)), and several of its Member States (e.g. Germany (2021)); this will be achieved by focussing the development and demonstration of novel methods and methodologies, as well as the advancement of their harmonisation and standardisation on (planned inhalable carbon-based AdMas in a variety of morphologies and dimensions, moving beyond spherical particles: (a) graphene-related material (GRM), (b) carbon fibres (CNTs), and (c) Poly Lactic-co-Glycolic Acid (PLGA). The focus on carbon-based AdMa is due to unsolved detection and characterisation issues especially in complex media.