SYMBIO brings together eight partners from six EU countries (Italy, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Spain, and Belgium) committed to building bio-based business models based on circularity from the design stage and industrial symbiosis.
Its methodology is designed, tested and validated in 12 EU pilot regions (Lombardy, Piedmont, Veneto, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Emilia-Romagna, Carinthia, Slovenia, Croatia, Andalusia, Brussels Capital, Wallonia, Flanders) which have been selected based on their biobased resources, socio-economic indicators, networks and intangible infrastructures and potential for developing close-to-market circular bioeconomy supply chains and current trends.
SYMBIO's solutions enable companies to identify additional circular value from their products and materials and mitigate risks from raw material volatility, pricing, and local material supply. Thanks to industrial symbiosis approaches, more circular solutions are available to companies, ensuring wider diffusion and supporting the implementation of sustainable business practices.
Sustainable production processes respond to the vulnerability of supply chains, unstable raw material prices, and high energy costs. In this context, the circular bioeconomy is one of the most promising tools to achieve climate neutrality, reduce environmental pressure along products' life cycles, and increase efficiency in using renewable resources.
Based on a system of multi-sectoral cooperation, the circular bioeconomy, however, faces many challenges, from safe and local access to biomass to the competitiveness of the bioproducts market compared to the fossil alternative. In this scenario, big data and artificial intelligence represent essential tools to model supply chain investment scenarios for targeted corporate and economic policy decisions attentive to social and environmental changes.
Thanks to big data and artificial intelligence, SYMBIO aims to build mature inter-regional supply chains to increase bio-based products on the market and a system to model, measure and monitor the symbiosis and its social, economic and environmental implications.
Providing an intelligent digital platform for building links between industrial operators encourages the use of less economically attractive secondary resources by measuring and incentivising mechanisms that reward and promote products with a high content of renewable raw materials.
SYMBIO also supports producers in decision-making by considering the different end-of-life possibilities of bio-based and biodegradable products, the effects associated with temporary and permanent carbon storage, and social effects.
