POWER4BIO general assembly in Brussels

19 February 2020

On February 19, the POWER4BIO consortium met for their third General Assembly and the Second Steering Meeting in Brussels. The meeting took place at the premises of the Flemish government that is also participating in POWER4BIO with its Department of Economy, Science and Innovation.

The POWER4BIO coordinators from CIRCE, Ignacio Martín and María Izquierdo, welcomed all participants and gave an overview of the project progress of the last six months, with a focus on the outcomes of the Review Meeting in December. All work package leaders gave a summary of the status and the planned actions of their respective work package in the next half year.

Contents of recent deliverables were presented, e.g. the Catalogue with bio-based solutions and the Middle-term Report on dissemination and communication activities. Also, short reports about first three POWER4BIO cross-visits to Hungary, Naples and Bavaria were presented.

Besides the summaries of recent project results, an outlook of upcoming activities was given. The online catalogue with bio-based solutions was presented and will soon be integrated into the POWER4BIO website. The catalogue was developed to help stakeholders in the field of bioeconomy to get an overview of available options to convert a wide range of biomass feedstocks into an array of bio-based products. It is of interest to policy makers, industry and other interested regional stakeholders. For now, the catalogue is accessible here.

Another upcoming topic are the trainings developed in POWER4BIO: in total, four trainings will be organised for regional stakeholders to spread bioeconomy knowledge at national and regional level. The trainings are divided into four thematic areas: biochemistry (June 2020 in Halle, Germany), food (October 2020 in Andalusia, Spain), bioenergy (November 2020 in Czech Republic) and biomaterials (January 2021 in Poland). Further information will be made available on the POWER4BIO website at a later stage.

One of the main products developed in POWER4BIO is the Bioeconomy Strategy Accelerator Toolkit (BSAT), a platform where all results and materials produced in POWER4BIO will be made available beyond the lifespan of the project. The BSAT is currently under development and will also be integrated to the website at a later stage.

The General Assembly was followed by the third POWER4BIO cross-visit to Flanders.