Author: JRC – European Commission – HEADLINES

The European Commission today launched a guide for policy-makers and business on how to assess the environmental impact of products. The guidance is part of the Commission’s drive to promote more sustainable consumption and production patterns and reduce Europe’s environmental footprint.

The products we buy and use everyday contribute to our comfort and well-being. However, they also contribute to environmental problems such as climate change, air and water pollution and the depletion of natural resources.

Businesses are increasingly turning to Life Cycle Thinking and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in order to improve the environmental profile of their products and supply chains, thus gaining competitive advantages. Public bodies are also using LCA to help assess policy options and support measures for promoting greener products such as ecolabels, ecodesign, green public procurement and better waste management.

The March / April edition of the JRC Newsletter has been published and can be downloaded here. It features an editorial from Cristina Garmendia Mendizábal, Spanish Minister for Science and Innovation, on the EU innovation plan and the related efforts of the Spanish EU presidency.

This month’s issue also contains news about the nomination of the EU Research Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn and the new Deputy Director-General of the JRC as well as reports from the fields of energy, environment, nuclear research and more.

The European Commission and the EU Presidency organised the first EU-US expert meeting on Critical Infrastructure Protection in Madrid on 4-5 March. The meeting brought together almost 100 experts from the EU Member States, the US and the European Economic Area countries, and constituted the opening event for the future EU – US cooperation process in the field of Critical Infrastructure Protection.

At the event, the JRC Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen (IPSC) presented the principles behind the identification of European critical infrastructures. The JRC-IPSC carries out research work in support to European policies in this field by providing policy makers and stakeholders with information, instruments and methods for the identification of critical infrastructures, for a better understanding of the risks, for the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the security issues as well as for the determination of the security condition of systems.

On Monday 1 March, the JRC’s Ispra site in Northern Italy hosted 1000 young guests from 23 different schools. The day’s programme, tailored according to the needs of each school and age category, included 18 laboratory visits, from vehicle emissions to the European Laboratory for Structural Assessment and 11 seminars, on topics such as the traceability of animals or or radioactivity in the environment. The pupils and students were between 10 and 18 years old and their feedback indicates that the day was a real success. Quite a few of the young visitors even indicated they may be seriously considering a future career in science and technology.

The JRC launched today the Internet version of its Publications Repository. Bibliographic data of almost 10000 articles and papers representing a wealth of knowledge are now available to the public. In addition, more than 1700 technical reports (EUR series) are freely available for download.

Publications can be found by free-text search, or advanced search based on bibliographic data. The publications can be browsed by JRC Institute, publication year, author, or title and cross-links are supplied to find all works of a particular author.

As one of her first activities since taking office on 10 February, newly appointed European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science Máire Geoghegan-Quinn today visited the JRC Institute for Reference Materials and Measurement (IRMM) in Geel, Belgium.

"I am delighted to be today at the Joint Research Centre and have the opportunity to witness personally the superb quality of the scientific support provided by its staff. It is reassuring to know that the European Commission can count on the scientific expertise of the JRC during the policy making process", said the Commissioner.

Physicists at the JRC Institute for Reference Materials and Measurements (IRMM) have helped unveil the secrets of a Bronze Age sword with neutron beams otherwise used to study materials for nuclear reactors. The work was carried out by a team of European researchers investigating the application of modern scientific methods to cultural heritage objects.

Scientists at the IRMM studied the composition of the Buggenum sword using pulsed neutron beams as part of the European-funded project ANCIENT CHARM. In close collaboration with scientists from the Delft University of Technology, ten scientific institutes and museums collaborated to improve and develop certain neutron-based non-destructive analytical and imaging methods for cultural heritage objects.

The European Commission has today appointed Robert-Jan Smits as Deputy Director General of the JRC. He follows Anneli Pauli, who had left the JRC to become Deputy Director General of the Commission’s Research Directorate-General.

Robert-Jan Smits is the Director for the European Research Area: Research Programmes and Capacity at the Commission’s Research Directorate-General, where his current responsibilities include: joint programming, coordination of national research programmes, cooperation with intergovernmental research organisations (EIROforum, EUREKA, COST), research infrastructures, regions of knowledge, research potential and the relations with the European Investment Bank (EIB).

The JRC is organising a two-day workshop on the internationalisation of Research and Development (R&D), in cooperation with Turkish partners METU TEKPOL (Middle East Technical University Science and Technology Policies Research Centre) and TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey). This workshop will take place in Ankara (Turkey) on the 25th and 26th of May 2010. Abstracts for participation in the event can be submitted until 31 March 2010.

The aim of the Workshop on the Internationalisation of R&D and Policy Outcomes at Governmental and Institutional Level is to identify the challenges faced by the internationalization of R&D and increased collaboration both at public and private level.Over the two days of the workshop, there will be plenary presentations by invited speakers, as well as poster sessions, where participants will have the opportunity to present related research activities. JRC Enlargement and Integration funding will assure participation of representatives from the enlargement and neighbourhood countries. The event will have a strong policy orientation and is targeted both at policy makers and at the research community.

The second edition of the high level event on ICT for energy efficiency is organised by the European Commission’s Information Society and Media Directorate-General, in cooperation with the Spanish Presidency of the European Union.

The JRC plays a significant role in supporting energy efficiency policies, through the development of voluntary energy efficiency standards (codes of conduct) for ICT equipment manufacturers and service providers. This includes for example external power supplies, digital TV equipment (set top boxes), uninterruptible Power systems, broadband equipment and data centres. The JRC Institute for Energy (IE) is presenting its activities at this event.

Satellite observation is the key instrument that will allow to double in 2010 the number of countries monitored in real time for detecting first indications of adverse agricultural outcomes. The new Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) system facilitates and accelerates the reaction time in responding to food security crises by providing a common and internationally recognised classification of their severity.

The JRC, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the American Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) are working to innovate and reinforce their food security monitoring systems and to develop more efficient early warning tools. These efforts come as a response to the 2007-2008 global food crises that significantly increased the number of countries under threat of famine. 

While in the US the Obama administration has said it will abandon the nuclear waste disposal project at Yucca Mountain and has set up a “blue-ribbon” commission on America’s future management of nuclear waste, in Europe, two countries (Sweden and Finland) have already selected a disposal site for nuclear waste and France will specify a location by 2013. In a number of other European countries (e.g. Switzerland and UK), geological disposal is the reference management option and things are moving forward to the site selection stage.

A recent report by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) on transmission network planning and grid controlling underlines that a radical change, in coordinated network planning and operation, is needed to accommodate market liberalisation and the increasing integration of renewable power sources. Smarter power grids have a central role in moving Europe towards a low carbon energy economy, as underlined by the European Union’s Strategic Energy Technology Plan Information System (SETIS) , led by the JRC.

To further strengthen its activities in the detection of single uranium particles, the JRC and Euratom Safeguards have decided to jointly establish a high-sensitivity particle analysis laboratory. The new laboratory’s core facility will be a large geometry secondary ion mass spectrometer (LG-SIMS) for trace analysis of aerosol particles. It will allow the detection speed and sensitivity of nuclear material to be increased by at least a factor of ten. The minor isotopes of uranium will become accessible, which is important for identifying the source of the material.

In support of the EU enlargement and integration, the JRC promotes the integration of organisations and experts from the two new Member States Bulgaria and Romania as well as candidate countries, potential candidate countries and non EU countries associated to FP7 within its research and technical activities. To some extent, partner countries under the European Neighbourhood Policy can participate as well.

The JRC Enlargement and Integration Action is promoting training, mobility and joint projects addressing specific needs of these countries and regions. Focus is on complex scientific and technical (S&T) issues underpinning EU legislation in areas such as sustainable energy, biotechnology, nuclear safety and security, food safety and quality, environment.

The JRC promotes, as part of its mission, collaboration with organisations and researchers from potential EU candidates. In this context, the JRC has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Serbian Ministry of Science and Technological Development. A Serbian delegation, led by the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science, Božidar Đelić, took part today in the signature of the agreement at the JRC headquarters in Brussels.

The aim of this collaboration is to co-ordinate as far as possible the research activities in the fields of common interest, such as: environment, food safety and quality, energy agriculture and nuclear safety.

The February edition of the JRC Newsletter has been published and can be downloaded here. It features an editorial from Enrico Predazzi, Chairman of ESOF 2010, on the preparation of this conference that will take place in Torino on July.

This month’s issue also contains an account of the annual JRC Excellence Awards ceremony, news on JRC’s support to the relief efforts in Haiti, on international collaboration for early warning systems and from the European Solar Test Installation, new data on persistent organic pollutants and much more.

The deadline for registration to participate in the Policy Forum of the European Conference on Corporate Research and Development (CONCORD-2010), focussing on Corporate R&D – An engine for growth, a challenge for European policy, to be held in Seville, Spain on 4 March 2010 has been extended to 15 February.

This conference, organised by the JRC Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) and the Spanish Centre for Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI) in close collaboration with the Commission’s Directorate-Generals Research and Enterprise and Industry, is one of the highlights of the Spanish EU Presidency Programme in the fields of research and innovation.

The JRC’s Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen (IPSC) has provided input to the 2010 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) released by Yale and Columbia University at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, 27-31 January 2010 in Davos.

With its expertise on composite indicators and sensitivity analysis, the JRC-IPSC has contributed to the EPI by evaluating the uncertainties underlying the index and the sensitivity of the country rankings to the methodological choices made during the development of the Index. This is the third edition of the EPI, which has been revisited biannually since 2006 with the collaboration of JRC-IPSC.

The current EU chemicals legislation REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemical substances) and the related guidance documents apply to, but do not specifically address nanomaterials. Therefore, the European Commission’s Directorate General for Environment requested the JRC Institute for Health and Consumer Protection (IHCP) to coordinate three projects to develop advice for possible future modifications in the REACH guidance documents.

The new projects deal with Substance Identification, Information Requirements and Chemical Safety Assessment. The projects’ steering group consists of the JRC, the Commission’s Directorates General for Environment and for Enterprise & Industry as well as the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA). The final output of the projects will be considered by ECHA, responsible for potential REACH guidance updates.