Happy Monday! This week is the start of my two-week vacation but unfortunately, I can’t stay away from blogging. Here’s one that I think is important for companies especially start-ups to look into and apply. Our colleagues at Nova Insitute is looking to award innovative technologies and products at its annual CO2-based fuels and polymers conference as well as its Biomaterials conference where I will be attending and giving a presentation.

Here are the details:

7th Conference on Carbon Dioxide as Feedstock for Fuels, Chemistry, and Polymers“ (20 – 21 March 2019, Maternushaus, Cologne, Germany)

— nova-Institute and Covestro will award innovative technologies and products in the Carbon Capture & Utilisation (CCU) area with the “Best CO₂ Utilisation 2019”

Carbon Capture & Utilisation (CCU) allows the approach to CO₂ as a novel versatile feedstock for fuels, chemicals and polymers. At least 90 projects/companies are known that are involved in carbon capture and/or carbon dioxide utilization worldwide. Beside a large number of lab scale and demonstration scale projects, also first commercial CO₂ capture plants and productions of CO₂-based fuels and polymers have been launched. More and more stakeholders are interested in CCU’s fast-moving, industry-driven innovation area.

nova-Institute together with the material manufacturer Covestro as the award sponsor will give innovators in the CCU area the unique opportunity to market their CO₂ capture or conversion technology, their CO₂-based material or a corresponding product which was launched to the market in 2018 or will be launched in 2019.

The producers and inventors are invited to hand over their free of charge application by 21 January 2019.

An independent expert jury will select and nominate the ”Top 6” candidates. Those will get one free 2-day ticket for the conference and will be supported by the award sponsor Covestro with professional coaching at the conference to be able to achieve the best performance possible within their ten-minute pitch of their CO₂ Utilisation.

After all pitches of the nominated “Top 6” candidates, the participants of the conference select the winners of the Innovation Award “Best CO₂ Utilisation 2019”. The winners will be launched at the conference dinner of the first evening on 20 March. After the conference, nova-Institute will issue an international press release and use all communication channel for publicity of the winning companies.

12^th International Conference on Bio-based Materials (15 – 16 May 2019, Maternushaus, Cologne)

— For the 12^th year in a row, the Innovation Award “Bio-based Material of the Year” will be granted to the young, innovative bio-based chemicals and materials industry for finding suitable applications and markets for bio-based products. The focus of the award is on new developments within these areas, which had been launched in 2018 or will be launched in 2019.

Deadline for submission: Producers and inventors of innovative bio-based materials are invited to hand in their application by end of February 2019.