On 27-28 June, the REFRESH partners ACCIONA Construccion, CETMA, CIRCE, EuCIA, GEES Recycling, TECNALIA, Enecolab, Gjenkraft AS, MTB Manufacturing, RINA Consulting and STD France gathered in France for the project’s first General Assembly. The meeting, marking six months from the project’s start, was hosted by MTB at its site near Lyon.

The busy programme commenced with a tour of MTB’s cable recycling plant. Founded in 1981, MTB develops machines to process copper and aluminium cables, waste from electric and electronic equipment (WEEE), ordinary industrial waste (OIW), tyres, scrap metal, and more. The company designs and manufactures recycling machines and complete units weighing up to 800 tonnes in-house.

The remainder of the meeting was dedicated to presentations providing updates on the progress achieved so far in the project’s eight work packages (WPs), and discussing the activities planned for the next six months.

• The REFRESH work packages:
• WP1: Design of portable dismantling, shredding and sorting technologies (Leader: MTB);
• WP2: Development and customisation of recycling processes (Leader: GEES);
• WP3: Business plan (Leader: RINA);
• WP4: Process integration, demonstration and testing at TRL 7 (Leader: GEES);
• WP5: Digital platform and prototype development (Leader: Tecnalia);
• WP6: Circular by design (Leader: CETMA);
• WP7: Dissemination, communication & exploitation (Leader: EuCIA);
• WP8: Project management (Leader: RINA).

The team thanks MTB for organising an excellent event and we look forward to sharing further progress at the next on-site meeting, which is scheduled for January 2024.