BRISA is a Horizon Europe project taking a comprehensive, science-based approach to protecting workers in energy-intensive industries from carcinogenic and emerging airborne pollutants.
The project aims to:
Replace hazardous substances with safer alternatives through Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) substitution routes.
Deploy AI-powered smart monitoring using wearable and fixed sensors with digital twins to predict and manage exposure risks in real time.
Equip workers and industries with adaptive protection systems, continuous risk management tools, and immersive training.
Build and share knowledge through open-access FAIR datasets, harmonised protocols, and inputs to EU policy and standardisation frameworks.
Validate solutions at scale through five real-world industrial pilots in ceramics, foundry, mineral fillers, ELT recycling and plastics recycling.
Future Needs is a full partner in BRISA, leading the project’s dissemination, communication, stakeholder engagement, exploitation, replication, industrialisation, and business development activities across all project phases. This means ensuring that BRISA’s results, from validated datasets and safer material formulations to digital monitoring tools, reach the right audiences: industry, policymakers, workers, SMEs, and the wider public.
Specifically, Future Needs leads:
Dissemination and Communication: Coordinating the project’s Dissemination and Communication Plan, including branding, the project website, social media, newsletters, press releases, promotional videos, and podcasts.
Stakeholder Engagement and Clustering: Building links with EU initiatives and industrial clusters, organising Open Days at pilot sites, and facilitating co-design workshops and hackathons.
Exploitation Strategy and Industrialisation Roadmap: Leading the identification of Key Exploitable Results (KERs), IP management, and pathways for industrial deployment at scale.
Business Models and Market Strategies: Developing the commercial and investment frameworks needed to bring BRISA innovations to 600–800 industrial sites across Europe by 2035.
BRISA’s ambition is systemic change. By 2035, deployment of the project’s solutions across 600–800 sites is expected to protect over 45,000 workers, avert hundreds of premature deaths annually, cut material and energy intensity by 5–15%, and save 15–20% in compliance costs across the EU.
The project applies a three-layer methodology to deliver measurable, lasting change:
Layer 1: Intelligence and Knowledge Base: Consolidating regulatory, toxicological, and exposure data into FAIR datasets and harmonised monitoring protocols.
Layer 2: Integrated Intervention and Control: Operationalising the Hierarchy of Controls through safer material substitution, AI-enabled digital twin monitoring, and adaptive worker protection systems.
Layer 3: Systemic Assessment and Transfer: Validating solutions across five real-world industrial pilots, integrating sustainability assessments, techno-economic analysis, and an SSbD scoring framework.
By 2035, this approach is expected to deliver:
BRISA’s methodology will be validated through five pilots, in five industrial sectors across Europe, each representing a distinct context and set of challenges:
