The incineration of biomass, municipal solid waste and sewage sludge produces significant quantities of ashes in the EU: approximately 25 million tons annually. These residues have currently no use or they are utilized only in low-value applications. Major problems with the use of incineration residues in the construction, water treatment, and other industries are insufficient public awareness of the safety and environmental acceptability of the final products , the lack of uniform regulations, and readiness of the market to accept incineration residues as a supplementary material. The project AshCycle will demonstrate and implement industry-urban symbioses revolving around the underutilized ashes to reach circular and climate neutral economy in Europe. Pilots and replication demonstrations will be carried out in Denmark, Finland, Belgium, The Netherlands, Croatia, Slovenia, Switzerland, and South Africa. The symbioses will include all major actors from the value chains, namely ash providers, ash beneficiation handlers, concrete and adsorbent product providers, as well as engagement of general public. AshCycle answers unmet socio-economic demands, facilitates emerging ash-based circular products for market entry and to unlocks benefits for society by acceptance of new circular concepts.

MAKING-CITY is a large-scale demonstration project aiming at the development of new integrated strategies to address the urban energy system transformation towards low carbon cities, with the positive energy district (PED) approach as the core of the urban energy transition pathway. The project will be intensively focused on achieving evidences about the actual potential of the PED concept, as foundation of a high efficient and sustainable route to progress beyond the current urban transformation roadmaps. Although in principle a PED approach seems a solid and ambitious strategy, this should be complemented with long term urban planning to ensure upscaling and fostering higher impacts. Currently city energy plans are starting to be designed with a 2030 horizon, according to the standard city commitments, as for instance those reflected in the SECAPs and other more specific city plans. Project will address methodologies to support cities in their long term urban planning towards an adequate energy transition, paving the way of the planning, implementation and up-scaling process. Cities of Groningen (Netherlands) and Oulu (Finland) will act as lighthouses. These cities are currently working intensively in ambitious transformation planning whose approaches fit perfectly with the project objectives. Both have committed to deploy a demonstration of at least one positive energy district. León (Spain), Bassano del Grappa (Italy), Kadiköy (Turkey), Poprad (Slovakia), Vidin (Bulgaria) and Lublin (Poland) will be the follower cities. All of them have assumed a huge commitment to develop a solid execution project of Positive Energy District and foster high level of replication of the solutions demonstrated in Groningen and Oulu.

BalticSeaH2 will establish the first, largescale interregional hydrogen valley in Europe. BalticSeaH2 will build a main cross-border Hydrogen Valley between Finland and Estonia and connects it with local valleys in different countries surrounding the Baltic Sea. The ultimate goal is to develop an international hydrogen economy and markets that work optimally both from the technical, economic and environmental perspectives across country borders in the Northern Europe, more specifically around the Baltic Sea. The project will develop, scale and demonstrate hydrogen use in production, storage and distribution, and in Use Cases in different sectors from industry, mobility and energy. The learnings from the cross-border build-up of a hydrogen economy will be shared with specifically identified Connected Valleys and replicated across borders between them, but furthermore, shared to boost replication and initiate new hydrogen valleys across Europe. The cross border Main Valley is to be located in the region of Southern Finland – Estonia. These regions are already connected with a natural gas pipeline, transmission cable and maritime operations and the Transmission System Operators (TSO) in both countries collaborate actively in the further development of the cross border infrastructures. The cross border nature of the Main Valley makes is possible to develop cross border markets and businesses for green hydrogen production, transport and use from the start, including also development of cross border neighbouring pricing zones for renewable electricity to reach optimized system, market and business designs for an efficient hydrogen economy.