INEGI will contribute to making the Portuguese manufacturing industry more circular and sustainable

Promoted by the Portuguese cluster of Production Technologies PRODUTECH - Pole of Technologies of Production, the mobilizing project PRODUTECH4S&C aims to strengthen the circularity and sustainability of the Portuguese manufacturing industry.

The consortium, led by the company COLEP, brings together 24 partners, including companies, universities and technological research and innovation centres, and has an investment of more than eight million euros to develop new methodologies, strategies, tools and approaches that will lead to new innovative products, services and systems, with application to various industrial sectors.

The project will focus on three complementary areas of the value chain, namely product development, production systems and supply chains, committing to the principles of circular economy and sustainability, in order to ensure results with a direct impact on industries using production technologies.

"At INEGI, we are responsible for a set of tasks throughout this project, most of them focused on the development of new methodologies and tools applied to product development. These will reduce the "time to market" and raise the levels of sustainability and circularity of products, based on the evaluation of the data generated by the production systems in the use phase, which will serve as input in the design phase, for the introduction of improvements or for the development of new products”, explains António Baptista, responsible for the project at INEGI.

However, the Institute's collaboration does not end here. There will also be contributions related to the development of strategies and approaches for a "zero emissions, zero waste" logic, using new Lean & Green methodologies in the context of Industry 4.0, as well as energy recovery models via industrial symbiosis and technological bases and economics of waste heat recovery.

On the other hand, it is also up to INEGI to identify sustainable energy solutions that contribute to the decarbonization of production processes, particularly thermal ones. This is because, in the industrial sector, two thirds of energy consumption is in the form of heat rather than electricity.

By 2023, the work carried out within the scope of this mobilizing project should enable the demonstration in an industrial context of the innovative objectives proposed, in three end-users in the fields of logistics, production of metal products and manufacturing of equipment. SONAE MC, COLEP and JPM Industry will be the project's partner companies to integrate this challenge.

As part of the "Mobilizing Programs", which aim to promote the growth of knowledge-intensive economic activities and the creation of value based on innovation, the PRODUTECH4S&C – Sustainable Produtech & Circular project is co-financed under the Lisbon 2020, COMPETE 2020, Portugal 2020 programs and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).