Date: June 2025
Location: Europe wide
On June 11th, the SALIENT project, organised by the Bax Advanced Materials team, hosted a cross-fertilisation workshop. The workshop brought together 16 Horizon Europe projects working on lightweighting solutions across advanced materials, sustainable manufacturing, digital tools, and circular economy strategies.
Challenge
Lightweighting is a powerful enabler for Europe’s transition towards climate neutrality, circularity, and industrial competitiveness. Yet projects often advance in parallel, with limited opportunities to connect insights, align KPIs, and translate results into systemic change.
Without deliberate cross-fertilisation, valuable innovation risks remaining siloed, slowing its uptake by industry and policymakers.
Approach
Leveraging its strong networks across advanced materials, manufacturing, and circular economy communities, Bax brought together 16 Horizon Europe projects to align around shared KPIs like CO₂ reduction, material recovery, cost efficiency, and awareness. The workshop created a collaborative space to exchange insights, map innovation outcomes to broader challenges, and uncover funding and policy opportunities to accelerate lightweighting across Europe.
By focusing on common challenges, it showed how different solutions could be combined to maximise their impact, driving more coordinated answers to Europe’s lightweighting needs.
Impact
The SALIENT workshop turned fragmented projects into collective momentum, driving faster decarbonisation, new pathways for circular materials, and stronger collaboration across sectors, all advancing Europe’s goal of becoming climate-neutral and competitive by 2050. It also underscored the importance of lightweighting innovation in Europe and the tangible benefits it can deliver to society. To summarise the results of the workshop, we created a two-pager document that raises awareness and brings the topic closer to citizens by highlighting real-world advantages of lightweighting.
Explore the two-pager to see the key insights, technologies, and opportunities in detail below.
