POSIDON PCP – POlluted Site DecontaminatiON PCP

POSIDON PCP project gathers 5 European procurers facing a common challenge in the sites they manage, affected by analogous pollutants – 2 front runners: Port Network Authority of the Eastern Adriatic Sea Port Of Trieste (IT) and Bilbao City Council (ES) and 3 observers: Spaque (BE), CEA – Vitoria Gasteiz City Council (ES), Baja do Tejo (PT) – leveraging public demand to identify fit-for-purpose and cost- effective innovative and sustainable solutions to soil decontamination.

The common need identified by the buyers’ group concerns a soil (and eventually groundwater) remediation new, life-cycle, cost-effective technology, preferred as in-situ (and eventually on-site), to be capable of decontaminate heterogeneous anthropic soils in brownfield, composed by a mixture of industrial waste (like filling soils highly polluted by Petroleum Hydrocarbons and heavy metals) and soils consisting on clays and sands, highly polluted by Petroleum hydrocarbons (TPHs) and PAHs , and heavy metals.

Studies on the state of the art, patent analysis, foresight scanning, will be complemented with additional open market consultations in the upcoming months (June-September 2018), to have a confirmation that no available technologies can meet all identified functional requirements, thus appropriate remediation technologies cannot be acquired through traditional off-the-shelf procurement.

With PCP (pre-commercial public procurement), procurers aim to achieve ambitious improvements in terms of quality and effectiveness, efficiency and sustainability of new technologies, creating new markets. PCP, that concerns R&D services, will be split into three phases: solution design, prototyping, original development and testing of 2 prototypes. Each of the 2 solutions to be field-tested will be deployed in 2 diverse sites (Bilbao and Trieste), with different urbanistic provisions that foresee future land uses.

Evaluations after each phase progressively identify solutions offering the best value for money. This approach allows successful contractors to improve their solutions based on feedback from procurers. POSIDON intends to create a critical mass through the consolidation of a pan-European network of procurers who, sharing their needs and efforts, can enable the development – through PCP – and subsequent deployment – through a PPI – of novel technologies aimed to cover bigger market challenges in areas of common European interest.