PSLF PROJECTS
Coordinators Just Transition Mechanism
- All sectors
- EU Open Calls
EIC Pathfinder Challenge : Waste-to-value devices
- All sectors
- EU Open Calls
- Coordinators: Horizon Europe
- Opening of application: 24 July 2025
- Allocated budget: Up to EUR 4 million (up to 100% of eligible costs)
- End of applications: 29 October 2025
- Project duration: between 36 and 60 months on average
- Project submitted on: Open calls
Objective
Develop scalable technologies to transform hard-to-recycle waste into valuable resources, enabling a circular economy and remediating pollutants like microplastics and toxic substances aiming to replace fossil-based materials
Priorities
The Challenge seeks proposals that address one and only one of the following focus areas:
Area 1 : Fully integrated waste-to-value device
Develop a comprehensive waste valorisation approach by optimizing pre-treatment, conversion, product separation, and storage, enabling independent, scalable operations that treat real-life waste streams with minimal sorting and pre-treatment, while enhancing sustainability and efficiency.
Area 2: Understanding underlying mechanisms by means of computational material science and AI
Deliver advances and scientific breakthroughs in the fundamental understanding of the underlying physical, chemical, and biological processes that will enable fully sustainable and scalable waste-to-value devices.
Area 3: Cells from scratch by means of bottom-up synthetic biology
Deliver scientific breakthroughs in bottom-up biotechnology to enable the use of tailored microbial cell factories for the degradation and valorisation of waste and the production of fossil-free fuels, chemicals, and materials.
Eligible activities :
Expected TRL 1 -4.
Area 1 : Fully integrated waste-to-value device
Devices for converting waste streams into fuels, chemicals and materials. Devices for remediation; driven by renewable energy sources and focus on the selective production of added value products, beyond hydrogen as the sole end product:
- Fully integrated solar reforming or synthetic biology devices
- Integrated capture and conversion technologies,
- Membrane-based and electrochemical brine mining technologies recovering raw materials, CO2 and water from seawater desalinisation brines.
- Ex-situ remediation devices based on microbial/enzymatic and/or photocatalytic degradation, both purifying wastewater and seawater of noxious substances. This should take place in a reactor, not in the open field.
Area 2: Understanding underlying mechanisms by means of computational material science and AI
- Explore fundamental phenomena crucial to multiple waste-to-value device types
- Develop more accurate and less resource-intensive quantum mechanical and AI methods to guide, predict and interpret reliably experimental works.
- Bridge the scales from describing properties at the atomic, mesoscopic level up to the macroscopic device level within a multiscale approach and describe phenomena over different timescales.
Area 3: Cells from scratch by means of bottom-up synthetic biology
- Develop synthetic, fully artificial cells for future large-scale biotechnology applications, tailored to deliver desired functionalities such as carbon fixation or synthetic polymer decomposition.
- Engineer cell-like systems to produce compounds from abundantly available building blocks, such as water and carbon oxides.
- Engineer cell-like systems to decompose diverse types of waste, in particular synthetic plastic waste, into compounds that are valorisable as feedstock for a downstream production of fuels, chemicals and materials. At this stage, systems will not have to be completely autonomous and self-replicating, but the integration of different modules should be implemented.
Eligibility
- Consortia or single legal entities (universities, research organisations, SMEs, startups, industrial partners or natural persons) established in a Member State or an Associated Country
- at least one legal entity established in a Member State; or
- at least two other independent legal entities, each established in different Member States or Associated Countries and at least one established in a Member State, or
- Consortium with three different legal entities
- Applications with elements that concern the evolution of European communication networks (5G, post-5G and other technologies linked to the evolution of European communication networks) will be subject to restriction.
Average data from funded projects (2024): 6/7 partners, EUR 3,1 million, 44 months. Targets mainly research organisations but 25% beneficiaries are private companies.
