Highlights of Factory of Tomorrow, presented on www.nawaro.com

Status

completed

Summary

One way to face climate change and the dependency on fossil resources is to utilize renewable resources (“Nachwachsende Rohstoffe” – “Nawaro”) like wood, corn or reed for material production. These renewable raw materials are sufficiently available and store CO2 not only during their growth, but also after being processed.

The possible applications of renewable resources for building and material production are still known too little. It is common knowledge that wood can be used as an ecological building material, but there are much more ways to utilize wood and other plant fibres, for example in the production of plastic-like materials. Especially consumers and end-users should be in-formed more about everyday products and building materials made of renewable resources because it is not until then that an increasing amount of ecological products will be in demand.

It is this kind of information that the website www.nawaro.com intends to offer. The website is split up into the “Infoknoten für Baustoffe” (information portal for building materials) and the “Infopool für Bio-Werkstoffe” (information portal for bio-based materials). The latter has been expanded during this project in order to disseminate new research projects and products in the fields of biopolymers, composites and building materials. Especially end-users were targeted in this project.

Research projects of the programme “Fabrik der Zukunft” (“Factory of Tomorrow”) that focus(ed) on the development of bio-based materials were presented in the category “highlights” on the website. For this purpose, project leaders were interviewed to talk about the background and the importance of their research work. In the category “product of the month” as well as in the blog, new market developments are shown on a regular basis. News and the event calendar inform the users about current events in the fields of bio-based materials. The website www.nawaro.com offers a database and a forum so that organisations, research institutions and interested users can actively participate, communicate and show their products and projects. Questions and experiences with products made of renewable resources (e.g. straw bales) can be discussed in the forum.

New potential users were won through accompanying dissemination activities, e.g. a journal article. The website also shows as one of the first results in search engines and is therefore a crucial starting point for research about bio-based materials.

The website will also be maintained after the end of the project for information and networking in the fields of renewable resources.

Project management

Dr. Robert Wimmer
GrAT - Gruppe Angepasste Technologie

Project collaborator

Hannes Hohensinner, Stefan Prokupek, Magdalena Burghardt, Stefanie Ostermair, Pia Koch, Michael Pfleger
Gruppe Angepasste Technologie

GrAT - Gruppe Angepasste Technologie
Dr. Robert Wimmer
Wiedner Hauptstrasse 8-10
1040 Wien
Tel: +43 (1) 58801 49523
Fax: +43 (1) 58801 49533
E-Mail: contact@grat.at
Web: www.grat.at, www.nawaro.com