On July 14-17 a kick-off meeitng of RERAM project was help, with all consortium members present, incl. Wood Processing and Furniture Cluster. The RERAM project aims to improve resource efficiency and raw material consumption of the forest and woodworking sector in Eastern Partnership countries. The project is being financed by the European Commission and is being implemented by a consortium with organizations from Germany, Austria, Poland, Belgium, Georgia, Republic of Moldova and Ukraine.

While in Muenster, partners agreed on the process and content of the baseline study on resource efficiency to be conducted in Eastern Partnership countries. This study will enable to map bottlenecks in improving resource efficiency in respective countries and will set the baseline on the current state of resource efficiency in forest and woodworking companies. It will feed into trainig seminar for resource efficiency trainers, – partners will be able to have staff trained and subsequently provide services to companies.

RERAM project will facilitate closer links between political processes of defining the more efficient way for using wood as a resource both in EU and European Neighbourhood Partnership (ENP) East countries. Both EU and ENP East countries face a choice for making use of wood resource for energy purposes or for wood processing and related downstream industries to generate economic value. Such policy debates usually involve policy makers, scientists, analysts, industrialists, activists, etc. And while in EU this debate has entered a mainstream of policy making, in ENP East (Georgia, Republic of Moldova, Ukriane) countries it is a nascent process that RERAM project aims to re-invigorate and connect to the Europe-wide discourse.

Next RERAM project events will take place in Lviv on week of October 13, 2014 and will include a consortium meeting, training for trainers on resource efficiency and study visits to local woodprocessing enterprises. Ukrainian partners (National Forestry Univesity, sustainable development agency FORZA and Wood Processing and Furniture Cluster) plan to host a stakeholder dialogue on wood resources use and related policy in December 2014.