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How can an under-utilized natural resource - wool from remote mountain regions - be maximized into materials in local sustainable industry innovation systems that offer high returns on investment and contribute to an optimized, next-generation circular economy? Mapping, understanding and further developing products from the biomass for interior sound-absorption/acoustic properties and for soil enhancement will be at opposite ends of our research scope - ensuring innovation, impact, resource and fibre-property utilisation. With both a highly practical and important theoretical dimension, the project leverages knowledge-transfer between a diverse set of industrial developments, alongside research and scientific approaches.
The project team is composed of research, education and business experts on wool, fibre-properties, resource maximizing, value-chains, value-creation, dissemination and certainly knowledge-transfer. Alongside the practical and environmental work with the wool, a theoretical approach will aim to change the discourse on how resource utilisation leverages a more sustainable future. The team also has access to an international pool of experts within the fields the call addresses, with the potential for impact beyond Norway and Poland. Beyond the call themes, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are at the core of the project. Through better understanding how the wool from the Polish Beskid mountains can, through grazing, optimisation value-enhancement and dissemination of results and environmental consequences, Woolume aims to “up the volume” for best practices to enhance biodiversity and carbon sequestering, alongside economic gain, in a low-income agricultural region. The consortium leverages research, education and business in a complimentary triangle where complimentary competences are the key to the project’s success.