LIFEproETV Project Consortium Meeting

For the last two days the consortium of LIFEproETV was presenting and discussing the outcomes of the preparatory actions implemented under the project to define the potential for market acceptance and recognition of ETV.

We have learned a lot together since the project beginning, uncovering the opportunities that ETV offers to support environmental, climate and innovation policies on EU level as well as project target countries. The summary of our findings clearly shows the different aspects where ETV could be used to reduce the administrative burden related to the implementation of new technologies, proving performance for compliance or facilitating the most beneficial technology choices to address specific needs of industries. We have also discussed how ETV could support GPP.

The benchmarking of the EU ETV with ETV schemes operated on national level in Europe and worldwide showed that a strong reference of ETV in environmental regulations and public procurement belong to key market drivers for ETV, equally important to credibility of the scheme guaranteed by public agencies governing the scheme. Some interesting conclusions were also presented on the analysis of the competitive landscape for ETV. In some areas like water or energy ETV meets with strong competition of compliance schemes either obligatory or voluntary, while in others with less schemes available to demonstrate technology performance e.g. soil remediation technologies, ETV may gain a very strong market position due to lack of competitors. Taking into account the fact that issues like compatibility and accessibility belong to key factors of ETV value perception, LIFEproETV is working on a brochure demonstrating the potential for recognition of performance test data generated for compliance testing for the needs of ETV. That applies in particular to technology areas where ETV has a lot of competition, however still may provide an added value proving claims and information on the achieved technology performance where compliance schemes do not.

Finally, we have debated a lot on how to meet the promotion challenge of our project and ETV under the COVID situation, when direct interaction with stakeholders cannot be in full compensated by virtual meetings and when everybody is already fed up with webinars.

As a consortium we really miss meeting each other in person but we do hope that our next consortium meeting will NOT be virtual.