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• SUSTAINABLE INNOVATIONS is the Spanish partner of ALIGNED, a project where twelve European organisations will join efforts for improving the sustainability performance of present and future bio-based industries

• The project is financed by the European Union’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme with more than 3 million euros.

Madrid, October 20, 2022. SUSTAINABLE INNOVATIONS, as an expert in communication, dissemination, and exploitation activities, is the Spanish partner of ALIGNED, a project lining up Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodologies and bio-based sectors for improved environmental performance.

For 36 months, SUSTAINABLE INNOVATIONS will closely work with eleven partners from seven different countries to provide an evidence-based decision-making modelling framework. For this, industries, and representatives of five bio-based sectors: construction, woodworking, textile, pulp and paper, and biochemicals, will share learnings from their activities and provide relevant data in terms of environmental assessments of bio-based products.

The new and harmonized modelling framework will be tested and refined via iterative application and improvement. This will maximise industrial relevance and interoperability and allow for assessment studies across the bio-based sectors.

The main responsibilities of SUSTAINABLE INNOVATIONS in this project are to define and implement the communication strategy (corporate branding development, website, social media strategy, etc.), to coordinate the dissemination of ALIGNED and engage stakeholders around the bio-based industry and the LCA practitioners, and to manage the knowledge and Intellectual Property (IP) that will emerge from ALIGNED, ensuring widespread adoption of the LCA systemic framework by the bio-based sector.

“We are proud of the work we have been carrying out in the past years in the bioeconomy field and we are excited to have the opportunity to continue working in this sector” states Jesús Serrano, Deputy General Manager at SUSTAINABLE INNOVATIONS. “With this project, we have extended our portfolio to a total of 11 initiatives related to the bio-industry, and we hope to keep on bringing Europe to the forefront of the bio-based economy.”

Understanding the bio-based industry

With a turnover value of €2.3 trillion and accounting for 8.2% of the European Union (EU) workforce, the bioeconomy is a central element to the functioning and success of the EU economy. The bio-based industry is the part of economy formed by companies that use biological input (feedstock) to produce material, products. and services. It can be the biomass extracted from natural environment and purpose grown biomass (e.g. from agriculture and forestry, fisheries and aquaculture), as well as different forms of biological waste, side streams and residues.

The need for comparable assessment frameworks

The green transition towards a sustainable economy, including the bio-based sectors, is dependent on consistent and comparable product environmental assessment studies. One of these frameworks is the LCA, a modelling approach for the holistic analysis of the impacts, mainly environmental, generated by products, services, organisations, policies, and plans. LCA is a central tool for environmental management and decision support and has become one of the key tools for assisting the direction of the green transition because of the method’s capabilities for assessing impacts in a full system perspective.

However, current LCA practices for assessing bio-based products are not homogeneous nor harmonized and there is a need to solve this fragmentation by delivering one harmonized methodology for LCA of the bio-based sectors, obtained via scientific improvements that overcome the major existing limitations of current methods.

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