Specific Challenge:
It is essential to take advantage of the significant potential benefits from new technologies and materials while ensuring that there are mechanisms in place to prevent, identify and manage any potential risks associated with certain use of such technologies.
The European regulatory process should also instil consumer confidence in the approved marketed products and encourage the reduction of production costs and the increase of efficiency, improving of the quality of products and services, ensuring worker health and safety, and protecting the environment in order to keep jobs and a competitive economy. At the same time, regulatory bottlenecks to innovation in the process industry should be identified in order to ensure that innovative processes, technologies and products in the areas of circular economy, resource and energy efficiency can be introduced on the market in a faster timeframe.
In addition, many production plants, companies and industrial parks are presently using their own protocols and standards, which in many cases do not match those used by other similar companies. This means that it can be difficult to perform cross-sectorial technology transfer and thereby achieve efficiency improvements.
Before any changes in policies are considered, a very careful and well-thought analysis should be undertaken in order to minimise the risk of potential negative impact on innovation and on the uptake of technology.
Scope:A clear, consistent and predictable regulatory framework is needed, as well as a set of standards. Proposed support actions should cover the needs of the different industrial sectors representing big and small companies within the process industry. Their objective should be to identify and to propose solutions along the value chain, required to reach long term sustainability for Europe in terms of global competitiveness, ecology and employment.
The evaluation of current policies and regulatory or standardisation needs could include recommendations within the following areas:
While in some cases it is necessary to recommend harmonisation on a European scale through regulation and European standards, in other cases it may only be necessary to enable transferability of technology across sectorial boundaries.
Examples for this could be (but are not restricted to) the following:
The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU between EUR 500000 and 1000000 would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.
No more than one action will be funded.
Expected Impact:Contractual Public-Private Partnerships (cPPPs)
SPIRE
International cooperation