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News article9 January 2023Directorate-General for Energy

Technical Assistance: European SMEs on the pathway to decarbonisation

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In June 2022, the Covenant of Companies for Climate and Energy (CCCE) launched its first call for Technical Assistance.

The main goal of the call was to pilot a range of direct advisory services that the CCCE could provide to entities from four different target groups.

The types of applicants included small and medium enterprises (SMEs), groups of companies, authorities, and enablers (any entity that provides support to decarbonise SMEs, such as local energy agencies or business associations and networks). It focused on Croatia, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland.

In their applications, companies expressed their needs for support in a variety of actions. The most important need, unsurprisingly, was saving costs and measuring the carbon footprint of one’s company and products. Moreover, we have noticed that many SMEs who have already been working on sustainability for years and have implemented “low-hanging fruit actions” are looking for support to do even more (mainly those companies coming from Finland). A few other SMEs are feeling their clients’ pressure to lower their footprint and asked for support in how to achieve this objective.

Here are three selected companies who will receive technical assistance from our pool of experts: Plastic Farb, CNA Siena and GRAVITA.

Plastic Farb is a Polish manufacturing plastic packaging company founded in 1987 with around 200 employees. They already use recycled material in their packaging, but asked for the CCCE to help them measure the actual footprint of their products (safety, biodegradable and courier envelopes) and of the company itself. As this was the first time, they had measured their footprint, we advised them to start with at plant level which was most feasible.

CNA Siena is an association representing businesses in Italy. They decided to apply for the CCCE’s technical assistance because they wanted to learn best practice in helping their companies make the green transition.

GRAVITA Diagnostyka i Leczenie Nieplodnosci Wojciech is a private clinic in Poland and has not received much financial support to absorb the rising energy costs. For this reason, its main focus is to save costs during the greening process and decarbonisation of their building (800 square meters built in 2008). Many aspects were taken into consideration during the assistance: presence of photovoltaic panels and their coverage of electricity demand, as well as plastic waste produced.

We will keep monitoring the progress of all selected companies over the next months and report on their achievements in reducing their carbon-emission goals.

If you are a European company or business-support organisation and you also want to receive technical assistance, don't miss our next call which will be announced in the Spring of 2023!

Details

Publication date
9 January 2023
Author
Directorate-General for Energy