The PANTAREI project officially took flight with its high-energy kick-off meeting on 25 October 2024, setting the tone for a bold and transformative journey into the future of sustainable construction. With partners from academia and industry gathered together, the event marked the start of a shared mission: to radically rethink how we design, fabricate, and live in buildings by harnessing the full power of digital design and bio-based innovation. As the world races toward climate neutrality, there's an urgent need to not just build differently, but to build smarter-and PANTAREI rises to the challenge. By putting digital design and fabrication at the forefront, the project empowers fabricators, designers, and engineers to fully embrace new materials and techniques that minimize waste, cut embodied CO2, and enhance the bond between buildings and their occupants.

PANTAREI-“digital based bio-waste derived meta-PANels Towards A REvolutionary building Identity”- is a visionary initiative, coordinated by Prof. Laura Maria Vergani, that combines the latest in computational design, irreversible thermodynamics, and natural materials to create a new generation of adaptive, intelligent, and recyclable building components. Through its core objectives-from pushing the boundaries of material modeling and bio-inspired structure design, to fabrication and human-centered integration -PANTAREI provides a full-circle digital strategy for reinventing construction from the ground up.

This vision came to life during the vibrant Derby Showcase Event on 3 April 2025, where recyclable 3D printing took center stage as a symbol of innovation meeting sustainability. Hosted in the heart of Derby and organized by the University of Derby, the event unveiled a compelling future where agricultural and food industry by-products-such as wheat stems, wood waste, and even eggshell powder-are transformed into durable, high-performance building panels through a fully recyclable, zero-waste digital fabrication process. During the event, the bio-inspired design work package, led by Dr. Federica Buccino, demonstrated how principles from Nature can be applied through computational modeling to develop efficient, sustainable, and adaptable metamaterials for building components, in line with PANTAREI’s goals. Attendees explored live demonstrations of bio-waste-derived metamaterials, and learned how every component can be deconstructed, reprocessed, and reintegrated into new fabrication cycles-closing the material loop and aligning seamlessly with circular economy principles. The event highlighted how PANTAREI’s advanced computational design tools enable the implementation of highly optimized geometries that not only reduce material use and embodied CO2 but could also elevate, in the next future, aesthetic and functional quality. The printed structures proved that going green doesn’t mean compromising creativity or performance-in fact, it opens the door to an entirely new design language rooted in ecological intelligence and digital precision.

At the core of PANTAREI is a powerhouse coalition: FANTONI S.p.a., a leader in sustainable construction materials; 10XL, a cutting-edge startup revolutionizing bio-derived 3D printing; and four top-tier European universities-Politecnico di Milano, University of Derby, University of Luxembourg, and Delft University of Technology-all with deep roots in digital design and fabrication. Each partner blends senior expertise with rising talent through early-stage researchers, paving the way for breakthrough discoveries and spin-off ventures. With support from dedicated Technology Transfer Offices, this vibrant ecosystem is poised to drive a digital green revolution in the European building sector-one recyclable panel at a time.