New Horizon project in! Introducing TREASURE

TREASURE
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The news just came in - the proposal on which we worked this summer “TREASURE: leading the TRansition of the European Automotive SUpply chain towards a circulaR futurE” got approved.

@alberto @nadia @amelia @matthias @hugi @johncoate @noemi @MariaEuler @martin @IvanC @bojanbobic …

General information:

Type of action: RIA
Duration: 36 months
Coordinator: Politecnico di Milano
Other partners: TNO (NL); University of Zaragoza (ES); SUPSI (CH); University of L’Aquila (IT); MARAS (NL); EUROLCDS (LV); Walter Pack (ES); Pollini Lorenzo e Figli (IT); SEAT (ES); TXT e-Solutions (IT); Industrias Lopez Soriano (ES); UNI (IT); MOV’EO (FR).
Total budget: 3 998 714,63 EUR
EDGE budget: 263 812,50 EUR
Breakdown: 29 PMs in WP2, 7 PMs in WP4, 2 PMS in WP7 and 1 PMs in WP1, WP3, WP8 & WP9. The total of 42 PMS. We have 16k for travel, 28.5k for services (10 commissioned posts, onboarding events and ethics advisor), 5k for audit.

Submitted documents are HERE.

Abstract:

Car electronics is one of the most valuable source of Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) in cars. What it sounds so strange is the lack of interest of car manufacturers (and the whole automotive sector in general) towards the recovery of these valuable components from End-of-Life Vehicles (ELVs). Maybe, the complex set of barriers (e.g. regulatory, governance-based, market, technological, cultural, societal, gender, etc.) companies must cope with when implementing Circular Economy (CE) are making very difficult its adoption, by limiting potential benefits. All these data show as, even if car manufacturers are investing big capitals trying to shift their business towards more sustainable mobility concepts, the sectorial transition towards CE seems to be far from its completion. Especially at End-of-Life (EoL) phase, there are still many issues to be solved in order to functionally recover materials from cars (e.g. reuse recovered materials for the same purpose they were exploited originally) and the dependence from natural resources when producing new cars (even if electric/hybrid/fuel cell - powered) is still too high. This mandatory systemic transformation requires to all companies/sectors to redefine products lifecycles since the beginning, by considering CE already before to design them. To this aim, the TREASURE project wants to develop a scenario analysis simulation tool able to quantify positive and negative implications of CE, by leading the European automotive supply chain towards its full transition to CE.

What did we promise?

An online conversation on circular economy, focusing on the automotive sector. We are to explore how CE plays out in society, economy and everyday life, the points of
view of the people directly affected by CE. Our platform is considered as a tool to involve consumers and awareness raising.

We are the lead of the WP2 Circularity & sustainability assessment methods
integration & application, leading only 1 out of 3 tasks there. Basically our standard WP became one task in WP2 and another in WP4:

T2.3 TREASURE social impact assessment through a large-scale online conversation. (Leader: EDGE, Contributors: all other partners, M1-M12). In sum, it consists of:

  • creating the TREASURE online forum, stewarded by trained community managers (since M5). Defining “rules of engagement/netiquette” to serve as a social contract underpinning interaction on TREASURE.
  • a community journalism program (10 commissioned posts) to create “seed” content and attract new users and contributions.
  • 10 onboarding events (e.g. participatory co-creation workshops) aimed at collecting and reporting success stories about CE practices in the automotive industry on the TREASURE online forum.
  • code the TREASURE conversation in-platform, producing and maintaining a set of ontologies under the form of wikis containing the list of adopted codes and their definition.
  • a set of dedicated KPIs (e.g. no. of participants, no. of forum posts, no. of onboarding events, % of nodes in the SSNA) will be measured.
  • providing technical support throughout the project.
  • developing Data Management Plan and engaging Ethics Advisor.

Task 4.3. Semantic social network analysis module (Leader: EDGE, M12-M30)

  • combining primary and secondary data (WP2, T.2.3) in a Semantic Social Network (SSN).
  • data will be visualized with an interactive dashboard built on Graphryder to get strongest connections, drilling down interesting ethnographic codes and making inferences associated with specific codes.
  • All these actions will allow to define a CE ethnography of the European automotive industry and make some recommendations to be implemented in the modules developed in T4.4.

My concern is the duration (M1-12) for the task 2.3. Their logic was I guess that this is first part, followed by the SSNA. More appropriate duration of both would be M1-M30? I will make sure to report this and hopefully we can adapt before signing the GA.

True that the topic is quite specific. I hope it will still be interesting and we’ll be able to make good use of the project to improve the methodology and engage the existing and new communities in the conversations on circular economy.

I never went through the procedure from approval of the proposal to signing the GA, I will probably need some help mainly from @alberto.

Initial thoughts everyone?

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Congratulations and thank you for the hard work! Yes, I agree strongly that these tasks should happen simultaneously – it is best if we can start coding the data as soon as it starts coming onto platform, otherwise we start out very behind. Also the process should be iterative (the outreach informing ethno and ethno informing outreach).

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Congratulations indeed.
I think it is a great topic too and very actual in the context of the ongoing global automotive challenge.

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Congratulations :slight_smile:

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Mabrouk :slight_smile:

As for your question - yes I agree that SSNA and the online conversation needs to be happening in parallel, not least in light of the post I just made about the editorial aspects of bridging content and ontologies…

Plus @hugi this is a good opportunity to continue our discussion re developing and testing new puzzle piece?

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Congratulations!

Perhaps! I’m not listed for ER in this proposal as of yet - in fact, I was barely aware of it. It needs SSNA, so if I keep running and maintaining our servers and dashboards for Graphryder I suppose I will be involved on that end. If @amelia wants someone to work on the tech side in the ethno-team and be more cross-disciplinary, I can do that too. In general, I would like to work more “horizontal” in these projects, rather than being strongly tied to a single “vertical” silo. That’s what we have been discussing for future proposals, but I have no idea if that is a good idea to retro-fit into this one. If that’s possible here, I’m definitely interested.

@marina, when would this project start?

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I’ll need to check with the coordinator, but the grant agreement must be signed at the latest 3 months after starting the grant preparation.

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Let me know if you want my help. I am certainly interested in the subject.

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Ok, so following up on this, here’s the changes we proposed (and they are already accepted):

  • T2.3. M1-M30
  • T4.3. M7-M30

Deliverable under T2.3. is entitled “Participatory Social Impact Assessment”, initally due in M12, now M29. It will consist of: the report on insights into different societal groups’ understanding, and assessment of impact, resulting from the outreach efforts (community journalism) informed by the ethnographers. :slight_smile: led by @nadia with the help of @amelia.

In addition to this we provided more detailed information on our standard ethics procedures. @alberto

Thanks everyone for the fast reactions today.

@hugi to answer your question about the start date: it will actually depend on when all the partners will sign the GA.

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Update on Treasure. The preparation process is longer than expected (admin procedures…). The official date for the GA signature is fixed on the 6th of May 2021. We need to:

I went throught it, nothing seems out of the ordinary, but would appreciate another pair of eyes, maybe @alberto?

cc @nadia @amelia @hugi @johncoate …

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Seems the usual stuff.

In “background” of attachment 1, I imagine “background” is Graphryder. We give partners access to it, no problems there. I don’t see the need for any limitations.

Do we have researchers form other partners use Open Ethnographer? In that case, some limitations might be in order, because OE has write access to our database.

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No. We’re on our own for the “social stuff” :slight_smile:

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I double checked with Paolo, he says both Graphryder and Open Ethnographer tools will be exploited just by us. So we go with the ‘option 2’ in that part.

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Time to set up a team meeting to discuss TREASURE. The project should start beginning of June and we should distribute the roles.

This is the doodle with timeslots for next week: Expired Group Poll - Create a New Poll or Contact the Owner

Proposed agenda:

  • updates on the ongoing procedures and changes in the budget
  • general presentation of the project with the focus on our role
  • defining team leaders / members / individual roles

@alberto @amelia @nadia @hugi @johncoate @matthias @ivan @bojanbobic @MariaEuler