The building sector has traditionally been fragmented. Many different actors are involved at different stages, from the design to the performance monitoring stage.

EnginSoft , is an Italian consultancy specialised in computer-aided-engineering. It has experience of contributing to the development of low energy buildings, under the EU-funded DIRECTION research project.

Achieving nearly zero energy consuming cities: this is the goal of three large scale district renovation projects. They are currently being tested in Valladolid, Spain, Genoa, Italy and Kartal - Istanbul, Turkey.

Graphene FET Flagship is an ambitious European project focused on the eponymous new wonder material. Graphene, a one-atom thick layer of carbon, is light, transparent and strong, whose characteristics have yet to be fully discovered.

Andre Konstantin Geim is the only person who ever received both a Nobel and an Ig Nobel . He was born in 1958 in Russia, and is a Dutch-British physicist with German, Polish, Jewish and Ukrainian roots.

Urban mining is increasingly being taken seriously by industry because it gives access to materials—such as expensive metals used in electronics—that are buried in waste tips and landfills.

The NuOffice in Munich is an office building and one of the showcases of the EU-funded project DIRECTION . The first building phase was completed in 2012, the second and third will be completed in 2014 and 2015.

Much effort has been put into its planning and construction to reach this high-level of sustainability, which makes it the most sustainable newly erected office building worldwide , according to LEEDS standards.

To make a building sustainable, taking into account its climatic conditions is key. No better examples than the three showcase buildings under the EU funded  DIRECTION project.

Sustainable buildings partly depend on control strategies to be energy efficient.

Carlos Bárcena, head of R&D Projects at the Spanish construction Company  DRAGADOS .

Energy efficiency has become a key objective in the current context of increasing energy demand, decreasing resources and global warming. Key to efficient energy savings, however, are users' awareness and behaviour.

Making food and drink production for more than 500 million people more eco-friendly is a key policy in Europe. About 99% of all agro-food companies in the European Union are small and medium size enterprises (SME).

Livestock produces a lot of waste. One solution is to turn such agricultural waste into biogas to generate energy .  It requires using so-called anaerobic digestion, which consists in breaking down biodegradable material in the absence of oxygen.

Europe's tyre waste production is 3 million tonnes per year. Currently 65% to 70% of used tyres end up in landfills. Not only are they causing environmental damage, but a loss of added value in the form of new products that recycling can generate .

Householders do not always know how much energy they consume. To help improve their awareness, the EnergyLife app was developed through BeAware , a EU funded project, led by the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT), in Finland.

The quest for energy efficiency has become a modern mantra. But developing new energy sources and production methods is not sufficient.

Wim Symens and his team pioneered the development of the first robot ever to play badminton. But this robot is only a guinea pig to test a software application designed to optimise energy efficiency in machine design.

Katrin Lenz, an expert from the Department Life Cycle Engineering at the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics  (IBP), Germany, shares her view with youris.

Liberalising the heat market is, in theory, possible. It would operate in the same way that enables owners of domestic-scale wind turbines, or any other electricity producer, to sell surplus into the grid and draw power from the network.