REISKA - Resurssitehokkuuden parantamisella tehoja liiketoimintaan

Sustainable growth and the creation of new jobs are a challenge across all of Europe. In addition, climate change, urbanisation and the depletion of natural resources are growing global challenges. At the moment, 75% of Europeans live in cities and this percentage is increasing all the time. Cities are more and more dependent on their surrounding areas and their associated ecosystems. Moreover, the increasing demand for food, energy and water puts nature under great pressure and this may lead to environmental degradation and different types of sustainability challenges. On a global scale, greenhouse gas emissions (CO2) are no longer environmentally sustainable, and the demand for nitrogen and phosphorus have exceeded their sustainable limits, too.

A new law recently accepted by the EU Commission sets really challenging targets for better reuse of natural resources. From the year 2025, waste which can be recycled or reused is not allowed to be disposed of in landfills. Our project, REISKA, will tackle some of the challenges of environmental degradation by improving resource efficiency and know-how, and it will use this knowledge to help SMEs in the Päijät-Häme region take advantage of new sustainable possibilities to improve their business opportunities.

There have been numerous projects and reports on resource efficiency in the Päijät-Häme region but these results have not yet been fully exploited. In addition, local SMEs have potential waste and side streams that are yet to be utilised, and our project will survey and pilot those streams. The overall target of the project is to increase the knowhow of local SMEs regarding resource efficient operations and opportunities through the piloting of various sustainable methods and tools. For example, information about the material streams from the different SMEs on an industrial site will be collected into an easy-to-use geo-information application. Using this application the SMEs will be able to buy, sell or give away leftover raw materials to other SMEs on the industrial site, and textile and fibre side streams can similarly be reused for construction industry products. The food economy part of the project will undertake case studies on food production systems in the Lahti region, calculating their nutrition, carbon and water footprints. The results will be used to evaluate the degrees of closed nutrient cycles and possible ways to improve them, with the aim of eventually achieving fully closed nutrient cycles.

The project consortium consists of Lahti University of Applied Sciences (coordinator) and Lappeenranta University of Technology. This project’s concrete actions and different approaches and calculation models will create new sustainable business and new jobs. The development methods involved include co-design, and the national and international networks in the project consortium will be utilised during the research and development. The activities of REISKA will also strengthen Lahti UAS’s workplace-orientated cleantech and R&D&I know-how and improve collaboration between universities and universities of applied sciences. This collaboration will serve all stakeholders and Lahti UAS’s owner municipalities in the Päijät-Häme region.