Net-zero projects: €3.4 billion for 77 investments – what does the waste sector get?

On 19 October 2026 the European Commission announced which investments will receive support from the Innovation Fund call launched in December 2025: 77 projects sharing €3.4 billion. The selected net-zero projects are located in 23 European countries, and the Commission estimates that together they could avoid around 290 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent over their first ten years of operation. Seen through a waste lens, the question is how much of this money goes to technologies that turn waste into raw materials, energy or fuel – so we read through all 77 official project descriptions.

In short: The net-zero projects selected in the latest Innovation Fund round will receive a combined €3.4 billion; 77 of 358 applications succeeded. By our editorial count, 19 winners are built directly on waste or secondary materials – from plastic pyrolysis and carbon capture at incinerators to copper scrap processing – but there is no Hungarian waste project on the list.

358 applications, 77 winners: the numbers

The call (officially IF25 NZT) opened on 4 December 2025 with a budget of €2.9 billion. By the deadline, 358 applications had come in, requesting a total of €17.5 billion – six times the available budget. The Commission eventually selected 77 projects worth €3.4 billion, awarding more than the original budget.

By count, the success rate was roughly 21.5 per cent; the amount awarded is about 19 per cent of the amount requested. With this round, the Innovation Fund’s overall portfolio has grown to around 320 projects and almost €17 billion in committed grants.

The fund is financed from revenues of the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), estimated at around €40 billion between 2020 and 2030. Wopke Hoekstra, Commissioner for Climate, Net Zero and Clean Growth, said the projects show that “Europe’s innovators are turning climate ambition into industrial leadership.”

Projects were scored by independent evaluators on five criteria: emission reduction potential, degree of innovation, maturity, replicability and cost efficiency.

Five categories, very different weight classes

Support is split across five categories. We calculated the average grant per project from the category totals published by the Commission:

• Large-scale projects: 12 projects, around €1.58 billion – an average of roughly €132 million each.
• Medium-scale projects: 17 projects, €458 million – an average of about €27 million.
• Small-scale projects: 20 projects, €124 million – an average of about €6 million.
• Clean tech manufacturing: 12 projects, almost €895 million – an average of about €75 million.
• Pilot projects: 16 projects, €394 million – an average of about €25 million.

The large-scale category is clearly dominated by synthetic aviation fuel (e-SAF): five of the 12 winners – BELair, ECO2FLY, EFR, H4 Marseille Fos and L’Ardoise – are building such plants. The largest is EFR in Rotterdam, with a capacity of around 280,000 tonnes of e-SAF per year. Three further large projects are CO₂ transport and storage infrastructure: Norway’s ASTOR, the Spanish Mosusol-netCO₂ cement-plant capture chain, and Italy’s Ravenna CCS Phase 2, which will be able to store up to 4 million tonnes of CO₂ a year.

The list also contains two firsts. France’s NetZeroHeat will be Europe’s first heat-only small modular reactor (SMR), supplying 131 GWh of heat a year to the Pierrelatte district heating network. Norway’s Furu is a direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) pilot in Øygarden, removing around 4,000 tonnes a year and linked to the Northern Lights storage site. The Commission also highlighted six critical raw materials projects, such as the GAUSS rare-earth magnet plant in Estonia (up to 3,000 tonnes a year) and the Ageli geothermal lithium extraction plant in Alsace (15,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate a year).

Where does waste appear among the net-zero projects?

The Commission does not list waste projects separately, so we built our own classification from the official project descriptions. By this count, 19 winners are built directly on waste, industrial residues or secondary materials – a quarter of all winners. The grouping below is an editorial choice; the figures are the project promoters’ own estimates.

Plastic pyrolysis: two winners, open questions

The CIRCUS project (Greenertis Tarragona, Spain) converts polyolefin-rich mixed plastic waste into high-grade pyrolysis oil suitable for steam crackers. The technology couples a molten-salt thermal reactor with an electrified reactor. The promoter expects to avoid around 1.5 million tonnes of CO₂ over the first ten years, mainly by replacing fossil naphtha and avoiding landfilling and incineration.

The Dutch PLASTIC project (PTC Amsterdam) combines slow-cracking pyrolysis with inline decontamination and offers a modular plant model that can be replicated across Europe to help create a liquid market for circular pyrolysis oils.

EU funding does not, however, settle the professional debate around chemical recycling. In our analysis of flexible mixed polyolefins we showed how much the feedstock needed for packaging targets depends on mass-balance accounting rules, and our coverage of the chemical recycling debate in the US shows how contested the technology’s real contribution remains.

Carbon capture at waste incinerators

Sweden’s ReStore (Renova Miljö) is retrofitting amine-based carbon capture onto one of four incineration lines at a waste treatment facility in western Sweden. The full-scale unit will capture around 100,000 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent a year for permanent storage, which according to the description enables net negative emissions while preserving the plant’s energy efficiency. The project expects around 888,000 tonnes of reductions over ten years and will run dedicated education activities to build public acceptance.

Finland’s Eagle pilot will capture about 10,000 tonnes of CO₂ a year from flue gas at NG Nordic Finland’s waste-to-energy plant and, together with renewable hydrogen, convert it into polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) based polymers. The project claims 2.67 million tonnes of avoided emissions over ten years – the public description does not explain how this figure, far larger than the annual captured volume, is derived, so the methodology will be worth watching.

These projects are operating in the anteroom of regulation: under the Commission’s proposal, municipal waste incineration will be phased into the EU ETS from 2031. What that is likely to cost incinerators in practice is covered in our article on Zero Waste Europe’s analysis. The loop closes here: a fund financed by ETS revenues is paying today for the technologies with which incinerators may cut their own ETS bills tomorrow.

Metals and critical raw materials: waste as a mine

The Dutch SCRAP project (Myne Circular Metals) processes complex non-ferrous scrap streams, pairing AI-driven alloy sorting with Magnetic Density Separation for fine particles to recover specification-compliant aluminium, brass and copper.

Bulgaria’s SVAROG (Sofia Med) converts low-grade, heterogeneous copper scrap into copper purer than 99.9 per cent and a copper-nickel alloy, feeding an existing pyrometallurgical foundry and avoiding around 1.16 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent over ten years.

Lithuania’s REFINIS-CRM (Refinis) recovers platinum group metals from end-of-life waste, linking direct-current plasma smelting, a top-blown rotary converter and molecular-recognition hydrometallurgical refining into a continuous process, with an output of around 8.21 tonnes a year of high-purity platinum, palladium and rhodium.

Sweden’s RE-MET (GreenIron H2) reduces oxidised steelmaking scale with renewable hydrogen instead of coke, producing around 53,000 tonnes a year of hydrogen-direct-reduced metal in Norrsundet for reuse in steelmaking. The promoter sees replication potential at 40 sites across Europe. Belgium’s ReGAIN (Umicore) uses reusable germanium substrates to cut the germanium needed for high-performance solar cells used in space and advanced photovoltaics.

These projects point in the same direction as the 46 new EU critical raw materials Strategic Projects selected in early October, and align with the findings of the FutuRaM project that European waste could cover more than half of critical raw material demand by 2050. The financing gap in battery metals recovery, discussed in our piece on Europe’s black mass exports, shows why capex support of this kind matters.

Biogas, wastewater and landfill gas

Denmark’s BioNEXUS (Haderslev Bioenergi) combines anaerobic digestion with in-situ and ex-situ biological methanation: the biogenic CO₂ in raw biogas is converted into additional methane using electrolytic hydrogen, raising methane yield per tonne of feedstock by roughly 50 per cent.

France’s CouplHyNG (ENOSIS) is adding a biological methanation unit with on-site electrolysis to an existing agricultural biogas plant. According to the promoter, this raises renewable gas injection into the grid by about 57 per cent without additional biomass, and more than 18,000 biogas plants and wastewater treatment facilities across Europe offer immediate deployment potential.

The Dutch OASIS project (Groen Gas Waalwijk) will be Europe’s largest off-grid, fully electrified biomethane plant: with solid oxide fuel cell power generation and bio-CO₂ liquefaction, it enables biomethane production in regions where grid constraints would otherwise make a conventional project unfeasible.

France’s BIOHYGAS (SEV Energies Nouvelles) will produce 400 kilograms of hydrogen a day from landfill biogas at the Lapouyade landfill near Bordeaux, using methane tri-reforming technology and mainly serving mobility users. Spain’s VICTORIA (ICODOS) will produce around 3,800 tonnes of e-methanol a year at the Copero wastewater treatment plant in Seville from biogenic CO₂ and hydrogen from a 10 MW electrolyser, primarily for shipping.

Industrial residues and by-products

Spain’s CATREF (XFuel) converts marine oily waste and oil-containing residues into marine gas oil meeting ISO 8217, a drop-in fuel requiring no changes to vessels. The project expects 92.18 per cent GHG savings and has signed offtake agreements covering around 84,000 tonnes a year.

Belgium’s ReACt (Cargen Group) reactivates saturated activated carbon for industrial air, biogas and water purification at the Port of Antwerp-Bruges while safely destroying contaminants, including PFAS. The Dutch ACE project (ChainCraft) uses anaerobic chain elongation to turn food-processing residues into fatty acids, replacing fossil and palm-oil-derived chemical inputs. Hamburg-based BEYOND (Traceless Materials) makes plastic-like natural polymer materials from agricultural residues, while Romania’s TERRA-Q (Calamearic) produces tiles with high shares of secondary mineral materials through a fully electrified, kiln-free process, cutting emissions by about 80 per cent.

Hungary on the list: two manufacturing projects, no waste project

Hungarian sites feature in two winners, both in the clean tech manufacturing category. FLOW4EVE, coordinated by Robert Bosch GmbH with sites in Hungary and Romania, will industrialise a heat-pump-centred vehicle system that can extend winter driving range for electric cars by up to 20 per cent and, according to the promoter, save around 3 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent over its first ten years. PUMPEDGE, coordinated by CAADEX Kft., will develop and commercialise five industrial heat pumps of 20–100 kW using a novel thermally conductive contact material that improves energy efficiency by around 30 per cent over a ten-year lifecycle, avoiding an estimated 242,000 tonnes of industrial CO₂ in its first ten years.

No waste project from Hungary was selected – just as no Hungarian investment appeared on October’s list of critical raw materials Strategic Projects. Several countries in the region did make it, however: Romania with TERRA-Q, Bulgaria with SVAROG, Croatia with KONCAR-NEXUS, Austria with KI-ZERO carbon capture at a cement plant, and Czechia with the floating heat platform in Prague (ComPon).

It is worth noting that the small-scale category’s average grant of around €6 million matches the scale that a regional waste management company or a biogas plant could realistically reach. BIOHYGAS (hydrogen from landfill gas) and CouplHyNG (biological methanation at an existing biogas plant) are exactly this kind of replicable model built on existing infrastructure.

Selection is not yet a contract

Today’s announcement means selection, not a signed grant agreement. In the next step, CINEA, the Commission’s executive agency, will prepare the grant agreements together with the project promoters. In the previous 2023 call, 85 projects were selected for €4.8 billion, but by March 2025 77 had signed, for around €4.2 billion, and further projects were invited from the reserve list.

The same may happen this time: not every project announced now will reach the contract stage, and those that do still have to be built. The capacity and emission figures in the project descriptions are the applicants’ own estimates; only years of operation will show actual performance.

The next round starts in December

The Commission plans to launch the next Innovation Fund calls in early December 2026. These will include a dedicated €1 billion category for clean tech manufacturing, aimed at reducing supply chain risks under the RESourceEU Action Plan.

What does this mean for the waste sector?

Three lessons stand out. First, waste projects take a significant share by number, but the big money typically goes elsewhere – to e-fuels, CO₂ storage infrastructure and manufacturing capacity. Second, most of the supported waste technologies are not stand-alone silver bullets but add-ons to existing facilities: an incineration line, a biogas plant, a foundry, a wastewater treatment plant. Third, EU money is also taking risks in areas where the professional debate is not yet settled, such as plastic pyrolysis. Which of these becomes an industrial standard will be decided not by the selection but by operating data.

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Frequently asked questions about net-zero projects

How many net-zero projects received Innovation Fund support in October 2026?

On 19 October 2026 the European Commission selected 77 projects for a combined €3.4 billion in support. The winners are located in 23 European countries, and the Commission estimates that together they could avoid around 290 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent over their first ten years. The money comes from EU Emissions Trading System revenues.

How competitive was the Innovation Fund call?

Competition was very strong: 358 applications came in, requesting a total of €17.5 billion against an original budget of €2.9 billion. The 77 winners represent roughly 21.5 per cent of applications, and the €3.4 billion awarded is about 19 per cent of the amount requested.

Which waste management projects received funding?

By our editorial count, 19 winners are built on waste or secondary materials. They include two plastic pyrolysis projects (CIRCUS, PLASTIC), two carbon capture projects at waste incinerators (ReStore, Eagle), metal and critical raw material recovery (SCRAP, SVAROG, REFINIS-CRM, RE-MET), and biogas, wastewater and landfill gas projects such as BioNEXUS, CouplHyNG and BIOHYGAS.

Is there a Hungarian winner on the list?

Yes, Hungarian sites feature in two projects, both in the clean tech manufacturing category. Bosch-coordinated FLOW4EVE will industrialise a heat-pump-centred vehicle system in Hungary and Romania, while CAADEX Kft.’s PUMPEDGE project will develop industrial heat pumps. No Hungarian waste management project was selected in this round.

Are the selected projects guaranteed to receive the money?

No, because selection is not yet a signed grant agreement. CINEA prepares the agreements together with the project promoters. In the previous 2023 call, 85 projects were selected, but only 77 had signed by March 2025, and further applicants were invited from the reserve list. Some of the current winners may also drop out.

When does the next Innovation Fund call open?

According to the Commission’s plans, the next call opens in early December 2026. It will include a dedicated €1 billion category for clean tech manufacturing, aimed at reducing supply chain risks under the RESourceEU Action Plan. The small-scale category’s average grant of around €6 million is a size regional waste management companies can realistically reach.

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🔗 Official sources and references: 👉

• European Commission: Commission invests €3.4 billion in net-zero technology projects (IP/26/2187), 19 October 2026 – https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_2187
• European Commission: Innovation Fund – General descriptions of the selected projects (IF25 NZT: Large Scale, Medium Scale, Small Scale, Pilots, Manufacturing), 19 October 2026
• European Commission, Climate Action: Innovation Fund – Calls for proposals (results of the IF23 call)

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