The Bin2Bean consortium meeting, held in Egaleo, Greece, on September 9–10, 2025, offered an important opportunity to review progress across all Work Packages and set the next strategic steps for the last project year.

Discussions centered on different methodologies to assess and score biowaste-to-soil improver solutions from quality management and soil improver safety to choice experiment analyses and the finalisation of the scoring system as a decision-making tool. From an operational perspective, several workshops supported hands-on progress across key project areas. A first session refined and tested the scoring system through case studies, gathered feedback from Living Labs, while the Sense-Making workshop explored ways to engage stakeholder communities. In parallel, the Co-Fertilisation workshop helped prepare future discussions with Living Labs on policies and financial incentives for biowaste valorisation.

It was particularly interesting to see concrete progress from all the Living Labs in implementing different solutions to effectively transform biowaste into high-quality soil improvers from the roll-out of pilot actions to the active involvement of local communities. In Egaleo, in particular, the project’s impact is already visible: kitchen bins have been distributed to households, brown bins installed in residential blocks, and new composting devices introduced in public schools, several of which were visited during the meeting. Read the news about the progress at the Living Lab of Egaleo here.

These achievements provided a solid foundation for the workshop on Business Models, which invited partners to reflect on potential business opportunities and value creation pathways emerging from the Living Labs. The session encouraged collective thinking around viable and sustainable business approaches to ensure the long-term impact and replication of the tested solutions. Some of these concepts will be further refined and presented at the upcoming EU Mission Soil Week, to be held in Aarhus in November 2025.

Finally, the consortium discussed upcoming project events, including the organisation of the final Bin2Bean event in collaboration with sister projects. The project will also be present at ECOMONDO 2025 within the German booth. Additionally, a poster on the multi-criteria scoring system will be presented.