Driving Sustainable Mobility Innovation: Highlights & Outcomes of the ERCI/ELCA Joint Hack&Match Event
Following the successful call for challenges and solutions under the joint ERCI/ELCA Joint Hack&Match Event—themed “Design the Future, Hack the Waste: The Full-Lifecycle Mobility Challenge”—cross-European teams came together for the online Hack&Match event on closure on 22 July 2026 to present their collaborative results.
Throughout this intensive, full-day event, multi-disciplinary teams of SMEs, start-ups, research organisations, and technical experts worked closely together in dedicated breakout sessions over several hours. Collaborating side-by-side with industry challenge providers and expert tutors, participants co-created, refined, and stress-tested targeted technical solutions before coming together later in the day to pitch their final results to the group.
The 4 Industrial Challenges & Co-Created Solutions
Organised together with ERCI and in synergy with the ZEvRA EU Project, the initiative targeted key value-chain bottlenecks in the automotive, railway, and lightweight mobility sectors. Cross-border partnerships developed groundbreaking concepts addressing four main industrial challenges:
Driving Collaborative Success
Challenge 1 (Challenge Provider: APLEX – Poland | Solution Provider: VASI by Nature Inject – France):
Solution: SMART-INJECT RAIL — An AI-driven, plug-and-play process optimisation system for plastic injection moulding, enabling up to a 22% reduction in energy consumption and up to a 46% reduction in GHGs.
Challenge 2 (Challenge Provider: RT-Plast – Poland | Solution Providers: Bay Zoltán – Hungary & MoldXpert – Czech Republic):
Solution: TA&CoR / BIOTIP — High-value industrial applications (across electronics, consumer goods, and healthcare) formulated for a novel, 100% home-compostable biodegradable material derived from organic coffee and apple waste.
Challenge 3 (Challenge Provider: FARPLAS – Türkiye | Solution Provider: Poly Process Bureau – Italy):
Solution: The Scrap Digi-Pass — A software-defined quality control and digital material passport architecture designed to streamline the adoption of post-consumer recycled polymers (PCR-PP) into automotive interior components, cutting re-qualification lead times from weeks to under 2 hours.
Challenge 5 (Challenge Provider: STELLANTIS – France | Solution Providers: Bay Zoltán – Hungary & Havel Metal Foam – Germany):
Solution: Optimised Aluminium Foaming — Material composition and blowing-agent pre-treatment innovations that reduce processing temperatures to ~520°C, lowering energy demand and cycle times for lightweight crash-energy absorption components.
What’s next?
All deliverables have been submitted to our international jury panel. The evaluation is underway, and the official winner and the runner up recipient will be awarded during the official ceremony at the InnoTrans 2026 exhibition in Berlin on 23 September 2026.
