The WATER-MINING project’s goals are to both validate and to ensure the widespread uptake of innovative water technologies that harvest value-added resources (i.e., clean water, solid materials, and energy). Among the factors enabling technological solutions to be adopted broadly are policy measures that make the solutions relevant to stakeholders. Thus, as part of the WATER-MINING project, the WP10 team is designing a set of three policy packages, which will aid the diffusion of the innovations developed for the three WATER-MINING sub-sectors — Sea-Mining, Urban-Mining and Industrial-Mining.

As a fundamental step in this policy design effort, the WP10 team is also evaluating the gaps in the current policy environment, as it enables a policy package design that better addresses possible barriers toward technological diffusion.

The overall goal of this policy gap research is to investigate at both a European Union and EU member-state level (as well as with the partner country, India), the existing policy environment, its potential support for the widespread uptake of the WATER-MINING technologies, and the policy gaps that need to be further examined and neutralized in the process of devising the packages.

This action will collect the current policies, as well as tools and procedures, based on the circular economy impacts emerging from the case studies of the project. The policy package methodology will facilitate the identification of possible conflicts and synergies among proposed policy measures, as well as with Circular Economy Business Models, thereby producing a package in which its total contribution exceeds the sum of its parts. The goal is to enable the CEBMs of the case study companies to permit their widespread development and distribution.

Finally, this Deliverable will include a set of efficient and easy to implement policy measures aimed at EU and national levels. Moreover, this Deliverable will include a description of our efforts at fine-tuning the designed policy package to each of the specific conditions and circumstances of the three forms of water defined by this project (as a resource, as a consumable and as a durable) in relation to the project and case study pilots. This is again crucial in enabling the CEBMs of the case study companies.

The project will develop a roadmap for implementing effective policy packages, enabling the widespread implementation of the business models that support the technological innovation connected to the case studies. This task will focus on the description of each step in the road map based on the input from the policy-makers and business workshops, an explanation of its structure and the description of the resulting impact.