Autumn marks the start of SPRING

Amy Peace and Mark Talford represented Britest at the SPIRE Industry Conference in Brussels on 19th-21st September, communicating the key findings of a recently completed collaboration and announcing the start of our new EU project SPRING.

"...setting the framework for the enhanced impact of SPIRE projects."

Project coordinator Amy Peace summarised the main conclusions and outputs of the two-year STYLE project in which Britest led a consortium of 10 partners from across the range of SPIRE sectors (including chemicals, steel, concrete and minerals) to look at the pragmatic use of sustainability evaluation tools in industry and projects. During the project, Britest took responsibility for coordination and stakeholder engagement, keeping the project focused on a clear use scenario, and gathering insight and opinions from a broad range of stakeholders across the EU process industries, academia and policy makers. Read more in our  STYLE Case Study, and in the key project recommendations.

Amy also also announced the start of project  SPRING, which Britest is also coordinating. SPRING is tasked with “setting the framework for the enhanced impact of SPIRE projects” - in essence, investigating the barriers to industrial uptake of project outputs. As a first step in this process, Amy and Mark facilitated a workshop at the conference on “Embedding Sustainability and Impact in SPIRE Projects" which resulted in a great level of participation from attendees. The lively discussion covered a range of topics and “tales of things gone wrong in projects” and considered the practical difficulties of integrating sustainability assessments with project management.

We’ll be exploring a lot of these ideas and challenges further at our  forthcoming Britest Day event on 2nd November.