Wood Circus - Underpinning the vital role of the forest-based sector in the Circular Bio-Economy

WoodCircus is a pan-european collaboration project (consortium) of EU Horizon 2020 programme on side stream utilization and waste management in the value chains of woodworking industries, wood construction and wood-based wastes management. The project aims to a significant development of circular economy, resource efficiency and four-angle sustainability in Europe with an approach of cross-boarder transfer of technology and good practices and network collaboration. The project covers the RTDI actions, dissemination and impacts of Natural Resources Institute Finland Luke in WoodCircus.

WoodCircus covers mapping of current technology and good practices, listing of good practices and evaluation of their potential of cross-boarder transfer between European countries, dissemination to European and national decision makers and impacting to the coming EU framework programs, technology and innovation policies, bioeconomy and biodiversity programs (e.g., European Green Deal, Horizon Europe) and contribution to developing Triple Helix collaboration. The output includes state-of-art investigations, case studies, political and industrial initiatives, policy briefs and blog posts, periodic and final reports, scientific publications as well as conference presentations and documents and start the groundwork for European RTDI network of circular economy in woodworking and wood construction branch.

A great deal of the project actions are related to diversified data mining, compilation, analysis and dissemination at European and national levels in the four macro-regions: Northern, Central, Eastern, Southern, focusing on both political decision makers, business leaders and other stakeholder groups. High-level impact conferences and regional dissemination events and workhops had an important role. Main documents published by the project are: SWOT Analysis for Woodworking Industries in the four European Macro-regions, WoodCircus Good Practice Catalogue, LCAs on five Good Practices, Woodworking industries during the COVID-19 pandemic, and especially WoodCircus White Paper 2024: European Wood Industries are the Green Engine of Sustainable Growth.

WoodCircus is a Coordination and Support Action project (CSA, 2018-2021) of the 8th Framework Programme of European Union. The project is performed by 8 research partners (VTT Finland (coordinator), FCBA France, Luke Finland, COSMOB Italy, InnoRenew CoE Slovenia, Tecnalia Spain, nova-Institut Germany and Innovawood network) and by 8 industry federations and companies (Forest-based Technology Platform FTP, European Panel Federation EPF, Finnish Sawmills Association, BaskEgur Spain, EGOIN SA Spain, RILEGNO Italy, SIAB s.s.a Italy, VEOLIA France, Alfa Natura d.o.o. Slovenia). Finnish project collaborators: Ministry of the Environment, Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, The Finnish Innovation Fund SITRA, Puuinfo Oy, Finnish Woodworking Industries Federation, The Central Union of Agricultural Producers and Forest

Website: [http://www.woodcircus.eu] www.woodcircus.eu