In order to stimulate the rural bioeconomy and industrial competitiveness, achieve climate mitigation and biodiversity targets, and increase the resilience of production systems, the European Union needs forerunners, both in primary production and industry. Despite the widely recognised and urgent need to substitute fossil raw materials with renewables, under-developed biomass processing methods and business models, and poor understanding of the multiple benefits of well-planned, novel applications currently restrict the implementation of sustainable value chains with balanced environmental, economic and social outcomes. Every step in the novel bio-based fibre value chains targeted by FIBSUN need to be optimised, from cultivation practices, industrial processes, and business models, through to understanding the needs of consumers. The use of novel industrial feedstocks must not lead to undesirable land-use changes, such as the conversion of forest or land currently used for food production into land used for fibre biomass production. Instead, the related land use must be designed to alleviate the harmful effects of desertification, contamination, flooding or mining, by using degraded soils and marginal land to cultivate underutilised biomass feedstocks which can restore soil productivity and enhance the provision of diverse ES. FIBSUN will address these challenges using a multidisciplinary and multi-actor approach involving research organisations, companies and a wide range of stakeholders in a co-creational process aiming at outcomes and long-term impacts promoting green transition in the EU.

The goal of EcoReFibre is to develop and demonstrate innovative demos for environmentally sound and commercially viable recycling of end-of-life fibreboards, which currently have no commercially viable recycling methods. The quantities of fibreboard waste are growing exponentially in line with the growth in production capacity, and it is highly likely that more than 60 million tons of fibreboard waste have been created in Europe the last 5 years. This has caught the European recycling sector off-guard. EcoReFibre is crucial to Europe's wood-based panel and wood recycling sectors because of various inter-linked market challenges of the current situation for creating secondary materials from wood waste. EcoReFibre builds a strong pan-European consortium bringing together leading research institutes, companies and European associations who will develop and demonstrate a range of recycling technologies for waste fibreboard. Validation and demonstration of the technologies will take place in an operational environment as system prototypes (TRL7) or in the relevant industrial environment (TRL6). These include a sorting line that is able to efficiently sort post-consumer wood waste, extraction technologies for secondary materials (calibrated wood fines and wood fibres) from the sorted waste fractions, and conversion to valuable products, i.e. various fibreboard and insulation products, particleboard and novel biocomposites. As a major impact, the secondary fibres will substitute up to 25% of the virgin fibres currently used in the manufacture of new fibreboard. The economic viability of the technologies is achieved through a synergistic circular economy approach that exploits multiple valorisation pathways of secondary raw materials. The novel fibreboard recycling technologies are transferrable and exploitable for many other biobased industries. Environmental and social impacts and benefits are integrated into a life cycle perspective.