An Auditing Tool for Climate Effective Packaging

In 2017 Associate Professor Henrik Pålsson and Associate Professor Daniel Hellström of the Packaging Logistics department of Lund University was awarded a Pathfinder project from Climate-KIC. This project was continued in the form of a Partner Accelerator Project in 2018. The project aimed to strengthen and improve the quality of packaging audits for decreasing the total climate impact of packaging. The environmental benefit would be considerably by reducing emissions throughout the packaging life cycle, while concurrently generating values in forward and reverse supply chains. This would be achieved by developing an online auditing tool that makes it easy for stakeholders to asses packaging performance and its climate impact so that packaging do much more good than potential harm. The project was be done in cooperation with IKEA.

WOODeducation

This project was about developing educational materials for construction engineers on how to build houses higher than two floors in wood. Maria Fredriksson from Building technology was part of the project with a small budget. 

ClimDye

Magnus Johansson at the chemistry department led this project, with the aim of developing new dyes in order to dye clothes with supercritical carbon dioxide. The method does not use any water at all and thus is very resource efficient. One of the bottlenecks for the wide usage of the technology was that there were no suitable dyes.

An insurance-based climate adaptation tool for potato farming

This was a continuation of Johanna Alkan Ohlsson, CEC, and Veiko Lehsten, INES, ideation project on "Algorithmic potato farming", ie how to predict the outbreak of late blight on potatoe plants using historical data and weather data. Veiko continued the project by further developing the method and also linking an insurance solution to its use. The insurance would come into force if late blight does affect the cultivation after all. One concern for the project was the hot and dry summer of 2018 when potato crops were not affected by late blight. This has not happened since the disease first appeared in the 1840s. 

Climate Resilience Labelling

The project’s overarching objective is develop a viable scaling model for climate resilience labelling in a pan European context. As part of the scaling model we aim to build a consortium for internationalization and prototyping, which will include complementary international activities on climate resilience labelling such as the “Blue Label” developed by Dutch Insurer Achmea, and the German “Hochwasserpass”. 

eCircular

ECircular flagship is the only Climate-KIC flagship project in which LU is a full partner. The eCircular Flagship accelerates circular economy in plastic-based materials and dematerialisation of the plastic need with the vision of a carbon-neutral material system in 2050. The flagship works with radical digital innovations and scales up these with a focus on waste prevention, e.g. by promoting smart manufacturing solutions, advanced environmental design, new business models and alternative consumption patterns.

Possible locational effects of deep decarbonisation of heavy industry

Decarbonisation of the steel industry can cause regional value chains and geographical clusters to lose their competitiveness. Clusters located inland (eg North Rhine-Westphalia) are cautious that they may lose competitiveness due to higher transportation costs, compared to coastal production facilities. Discussions in the Flagship project concluded, among other things, that transport costs - today a very important issue - will become less relevant in the future and that active infrastructure planning could improve competitiveness in inland areas compared to coastal areas by levelling regional energy prices. The project has been led by the Wuppertal Institute with Max Åhman from the Environment and Energy System LTH as project partner. This was a Flagship project