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Furniture Renewal and Alternative New Circular Efficiency Strategies through Creative Approaches

Project description

A sustainable future for the EU furniture industry

Transforming the existing linear economic model into one that is inherently circular presents a major societal challenge: preserving natural resources while simultaneously enhancing competitiveness, innovation and employment. In this context, the EU-funded FRANCESCA project aims to provide essential support in guiding the furniture industry toward greater circularity. The project will pioneer and promote innovative circular solutions that span the entire furniture life cycle, from pre-use to post-use. To achieve this, it will develop and implement key approaches that address material, business-model and design challenges, ultimately delivering a circular furniture design decision-support tool, a dedicated circular material selection framework and circular business models that foster sustainability and circularity across the industry.

Objective

FRANCESCA aims to provide crucial support to the EU furniture industry as it moves towards greater circularity. The project's primary objective is to pioneer innovative circular solutions for furniture, encompassing the whole funiture life cycle, including pre-use (from design to delivery), use (maintain, reuse, repair), and post-use (refurbish, repurpose, re-manufacture, re-distribute, and recycle).

FRANCESCA will develop and use enabling supporting solutions that address key design, materials, and business model challenges. Concretely, the project develops, tests and disseminates a circular furniture design decision support tool, bridging circular principles with market-based instruments (environmental certifications and standards); it investigates, scopes, and tests alternative biobased materials to accelerate closed-loop strategies by implementing a dedicated industrial symbiosis platform; it designs, prototypes and implements a set of complementary circular business models; develops circular ecosystem management guidance and integrate circular value creation mechanisms enabled by Digital Product Passports. These enabling tools feed a set of three Circular Demonstrators, each focusing on a key circular strategy (design, material innovation, and service business model). Sustainability assessements and environmental technology validation of the novel solutions demonstrate their sustainability potential at scale. Finally, learnings from the project are cristallised in a capacity building toolkit for life-long learning strategies and a set of policy recommendations that are disseminated at EU level.

The pragmatic, holistic and hand-on approach, steered by sectoral needs (manufacturers, retailers, CSOs) and supported by a complementary set of design, materials, business and sustainablity experts breaks down the systemic barriers to circular transition and reduces the circularity gap faced by the sector, thus creating long lasting sustainable impact.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

Keywords

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Funding Scheme

HORIZON-IA - HORIZON Innovation Actions

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Call for proposal

(opens in new window) HORIZON-CL6-2024-CIRCBIO-01

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Coordinator

ASOCIACION EMPRESARIAL DE INVESTIGACION CENTRO TECNOLOGICO DEL MUEBLE Y LA MADERA DE LA REGION DE MURCIA
Net EU contribution
€ 617 750,00
Address
CALLE PERALES
30510 Yecla
Spain
SME
Yes
Region
Sur Región de Murcia Murcia
Activity type
Research Organisations
Links
Total cost
€ 617 750,00

Participants (14)