Workshop & Events

Call for 2025 entries on:
Innovative remediation, monitoring control technologies, products, management options and
opportunities machine learning can offer to deal with challenging contaminants, leading to time-and/or cost-efficient sustainable remediation solutions.

Deadline for submission: 24 September 2025 COB to NICOLE Secretariat.
The Awarding Event is the NICOLE Fall Workshop on 13 & 14 November 2025 in Budapest, Hungary.

For more than 25 years NICOLE has undertaken projects and organised workshops, providing a
discussion platform in Europe on a sound technical basis for risk based and sustainable management
of contaminated land. This is also reflected in NICOLE's name Network for Industrially Coordinated
Sustainable Land Management in Europe. Our network is recognized as a leader in Europe, and reaches
everywhere in the world. Recurring themes are site investigation and remediation technologies,
technology and knowledge transfer, risk management and sustainability, cost-efficiency, innovation
support and communication. One of NICOLE’s primary missions is the continuous promotion for
development and improvement in these fields.

Given the success of the earlier Awards, NICOLE is issuing the NICOLE Innovation Award 2025.

The 2025 call is intended to stimulate and to promote technical innovations that can contribute to an
improved practice for successful and sustainable remediation and land management especially for
difficult and “challenging” contaminants.

The NICOLE Innovation Award 2025 is seeking examples of new innovative remediation, monitoring
and control technologies, remediation and land management systems and practices, including
machine learning opportunities, which can either decrease the lifespan of a remediation project,
decrease and /or better forecast the overall remediation cost and /or be able to remediate difficult or
challenging contaminants. Submissions capturing all kinds of innovation are welcome, not just new
technologies or practices but also fresh thinking and behaviours in new business operating models and
practices e.g. new ways of financing or financial modelling, different divestiture programmes and/or
change of land use. So, if you have a new innovative technology, practice or process which can fulfil
one or more of these criteria, you are strongly encouraged to enter it into the competition.

Overall, there is a wide scope for the NICOLE Innovation Award, so the chances are that what you have
been pursuing can be entered. The only catch is that the entry must have been proven by a successful
field application. Entries which are hypothetical or have not been tested with successful results will
not be taken into account.

This award is open to projects from all individuals, organisations or groups of people, irrespective of
NICOLE membership.

Entries will be judged on:

• Innovative approach/solution where innovation is considered to be new (invention) and creating value (optimisation, streamlining...)
• Demonstrated at least at pilot scale (no lab scale, no "minimal viable product"...),
• Clear technical description of the innovation,
• Clear mentioning why this is innovative,
• Applicable for NICOLE members.

The Top 3 entries will be offered the opportunity to present their project in front of the members of
the NICOLE network during the NICOLE Fall Workshop 13 & 14 November 2025 in Budapest, Hungary,
where one of those Top 3 entries will then proceed to win the NICOLE Innovation Award 2025.

The NICOLE Innovation Award is facilitated by NICOLE’s Working Group Innovation. The jury consists
of members of the Working Group Innovation including representatives of the Steering Group. For any
questions related to the content or topic of the NICOLE Innovation Award 2025, please contact the
NICOLE Secretariat.

Time schedule and content of entry:

• Deadline for submission of entries is 24 September 2025 COB.
• Entries need to have a summary and a maximum of 6 pages description, including figures.
• Entries should focus only on technical and scientific content, and not have a commercial character.
• Logos are only permitted on the first page.
• Entries should be sent to the NICOLE Secretariat.

Prizes are:
€1500 FOR THE WINNING INNOVATIVE PROJECT
Pre-selected entries (top 3), unless already a member via their organisation, will receive three
admission tickets to attend NICOLE workshops (NICOLE organizes 2 workshops a year); in case (s)he is
already member via an organisation, (s)he may ‘donate’ tickets to a non-member of their choice to
attend the workshop in Budapest.
Winning authors need to agree to publication of their entry on the NICOLE website and in the NICOLE
newsletter, and be prepared to participate in a future technical workshop run by NICOLE.

Footnote:
NICOLE is a network for the stimulation, dissemination and exchange of knowledge about all aspects
of industrially contaminated land. Its over 100 members of 15 European countries come from industrial
companies and trade organisations (problem holders), service providers/ technology developers,
universities and independent research organisations (problem solvers) and governmental
organisations (policy makers).
The network started in February 1996 as a concerted action under the 4th Framework Programme of
the European Community. Since February 1999, NICOLE has been self-supporting and is financed by
the fees of its members.

Download the Call for Entries here: