During the market mapping activities which took place in the first year of FORESDA project, Croatian Wood Cluster identified three major challenges among wood processing companies in Croatia:
1. How to improve the level of safety on work
2. How to increase the energy efficiency of the companies
3. How to strengthen the cross-sectoral collaboration through R&D activities and innovation projects.
It is essential to find solutions and answers to these questions in order to secure the sustainable development and competitive market position within the national economy. The proposed PIE project should offer some answers on all of the questions, then the installation of the new exhaustion systems can automatically raise the level of energy efficiency (between 10-30 percent according to the latest research results). At the same time, the level of safety on work is being increased because the workers are being less exposed to the wood dust. Namely, prolonged or repeated exposure and inhalation of wood dust has short and long term effects on worker health, which could be also fatal. Therefore, the main idea of this pilot project is to conduct an educational-promotional campaign that will also offer a platform for the development of innovations related to the topics energy efficiency and safety on work in wood processing companies.