Europe produces millions of tonnes of industrial waste every year – slag, effluents, by-products – much of it hazardous, most of it still treated as a disposal problem rather than a resource. The circular economy promises a different path: turning that waste into new materials, new products, new value. But there's a catch that rarely makes the headlines. A circular product only becomes a marketable product once someone can prove it's safe, consistent, and reliable, and that proof usually takes the form of a standard or a patent.
This is where Circular Economy (CE) runs into one of its biggest bottlenecks. Unlike more established industries, CE is still a young field, and the standards needed to certify its innovations - confirming, for instance, that a material derived from hazardous waste is safe to use - are often still being written. Many circular economy projects don't know where to start: how to engage with standardisation bodies, how to structure a patent application, or how to prove to a buyer that their product meets the bar. And the cost of getting it wrong isn't small: without that certification, even the most promising innovation can stall before it ever reaches the market, no matter how sound the science behind it, or how many years of research went into it.
That's one of the real challenges facing circular economy today: it isn't short of good ideas, it's short of the standards infrastructure to validate them. Every solution that turns waste into a resource needs, sooner or later, to answer to a technical committee, a certification body, or a patent office - and that step is rarely built into a project's plan from day one. It's a challenge that came into sharp focus at the first edition of the European Congress on Circular Economy and Clean Technologies , held in Berlin in June 2026 as part of the wider EU Congress on Renewable Energy and Sustainable Development.
A research community still building its standards toolkit
Over the two days of the conference, researchers, professors, and industry experts gathered to present the latest science on circular economy and energy. What stood out across those two days was how consistently the same question came up, in different forms: once you've developed a circular material or process, how do you actually prove it's ready for the market? Trust-IT took part representing two EU-funded projects that sit on opposite sides of that exact question.
Z-ONA4LIFE: a circular product in need of certification
Z-ONA4LIFE is developing Z-ONA zeolite, a high-value material synthesised from hazardous aluminium salt slag, with applications ranging from gas purification to wastewater treatment. Trust-IT presented an abstract on the project's progress, but the underlying story is a familiar one in circular economy: for Z-ONA zeolite to be sold and used at scale, it needs a patent confirming that a product born from waste is safe. That patent work is already underway - a reminder that even a technically proven innovation still needs certification before it can reach industry, and that the path from lab result to market-ready product runs directly through standardisation.
HSbooster.eu: building the path to standardisation
HSbooster.eu exists to solve the other half of the puzzle: helping EU-funded research projects engage with standardisation bodies and turn their results into new or revised standards, at no cost to the project.
Circular economy is one of the fields where that support is most needed, precisely because so few standards yet exist and few projects know how to navigate the process - from mapping which standards apply, to understanding how a technical committee actually works, to getting matched with an expert who can guide the project step by step.
Get involved: standardisation support for CE projects
If your project is developing a circular economy solution - a material from recovered waste, a new recycling process, a technology built for reuse - the same question will eventually land on your desk: how do you prove it's ready for the market? HSbooster.eu is now widening that support, with open calls launching in July and eligibility extended beyond Horizon Europe to cover nationally funded projects and all EU-funded schemes. Circular economy projects can apply for free and receive expert-led guidance on standardization!
