The European Cleaning and Hygiene Technology Research Association (FRT) was incorporated in 1991 by renowned enterprises and registered in the association roll of the Krefeld commercial court; it is an accepted non-profit organisation. As a member of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft industrieller Forschungsvereinigungen „Otto von Guericke“ e.V. (Association of Industrial Research Organisations, AiF), it has access to pre-competitive research programmes and funding for small and medium sized enterprises which is financed by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs.
The AiF was established in 1954; it is an innovation network based on industry and provides support in research and development matters, helping small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to meet the challenges of technological change. Industrial Collective Research, funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, gives SMEs access to a continuous stream of new knowledge which can be used to develop their own products, processes and services as well as giving them the opportunity to build up their individual innovation networks.
FRT is a network of the affiliated professional organisations and companies in the field of cleaning and hygiene. It plans and evaluates projects of common interest and tries to find ways how to finance them. It organises an implementation relevant to industrial interests and the fast and effective transfer of the achieved results into practise. Its scope hereby is to maximise the financing from public funds, which is offered for pre-competitive research and development especially for small and medium enterprises.
FRT shall initiate research projects of its members' common interest, give help in transferring the results into the individual companies and thereby find answers for the growing demands of the ecological and quality assurance discussion in the field of cleaning and hygiene. The research organisation is funded by the subscriptions of its members.
The members determine the research programme by their elected research advisory board.
The FRT activities can be downloaded here.