Innovative solutions to scale-up urban green surfaces across Europe

ended

The ambition of this programme is to enable the widespread adoption of ground-breaking solutions to bring back nature in cities. Natural Grass offers disruptive solutions for urban greening: 1. AirFibr, the sports field application for football and rugby pitches, golf courses and horse-riding grounds 2. CityNest, the green building solution for green walls and green buildings 3. GreenMove, the future of urban infrastructure : green parking slots, green tramway track beds, green highway sound walls This programme aims at removing an important lock for Natural Grass: the mastery of its production process in orer to overcome the following limitations: - Flexibility: It only works with a very precise set of components - Control: Designed to produce the AirFibr substrate, the current line does not allow to vary the cork/sand/fibres ratio over all the range necessary to produce the substrate for CityNest and GreenMove, hence the substrate has to be manually enriched in cork - Reproducibility: a minor change in the process parameters or in the components characteristics can cause the process to fail To achieve these ambitious objectives, we propose an innovation programme structured in three steps: I. A study of the current process to formalize and generalize Natural Grass technical know-how II. The development of a set of innovative tools necessary for multiple substrate fabrication tests III. The completion of the final objectives: the development of a fully functional prototype line and of a wider range of appropriate substrate constituents.