In June 2023, the SustaiNext project began its journey in Extremadura, the western Spanish region where our Circular Bio-based Europe Joint Undertaking (CBE JU) flagship plant was to be built. Two years later, from 3 to 5 June 2025, the entire consortium has returned to Extremadura, specifically to Badajoz, to celebrate its fourth General Assembly meeting.
And the best way to illustrate all the changes and progress that have taken place during this period is to see how the construction site of our flagship already proudly displays a well-developed civil engineering project.
But this is not the only advance that has been made since the last meeting. At this encounter, organised by our colleagues at CTAEX Technological Centre, all partners learned about the progress each Work Package has made over the past six months. Despite having only recently passed the first Reporting Period, the milestones reached truly amazed the whole consortium.
The representatives of each Work Package took stock of all the progress made in the last six months and their plans for the next semester. Thus, we were able to know how the different crops involved in the project are developing, how the works of the flagship plant are progressing without rest, the trials and tests carried out by the different industrial partners or the progress of the multi-actor approach strategy in involving our stakeholders and the rest of the Communication, Dissemination and Exploitation actions.
However, the 4th General Assembly meeting of the SustaiNext project was filled with so much more activities:
On one hand, as a part of the multi-actor approach strategy, a fruitful meeting with public administration representatives was held with the aim of presenting key project updates and objectives, hear their perspective on how these solutions can address current social, territorial, economic, and environmental challenges and collecting suggestions and expectations to better align project results with public priorities.
The panelists that joined the SustaiNext consortium were José María Carvajal González, Vice-Rector for Research and Knowledge Transfer at UEX and Víctor Píriz Maya, Secretary General of Economy, Business and Trade.
One of the greatest advantages of holding face-to-face General Assembly meetings, organised by the different partners, is having the opportunity to visit the workplaces first-hand and be able to see and touch (or even smell) the progress of each Work Package. If up until now SustaiNext project’s visits had focused more on our industrial partners, with the very interesting tours to Nutraresearch, STAR (GBFoods Italy) and IRIS Technology Solutions, in this 4th General Assembly we were able to focus on the primary sector, visiting the fields of the different crops that form part of the project: cardoon, rosemary, camomile and lemon verbena.
A unique opportunity to come into contact with nature and to be able to see the origin of the feedstocks and selected medicinal and aromatic plants from which all the subsequent development of the project is based.
