The overall objective of the DRYficiency project is to lead energy-intensive sectors of the European manufacturing industry to high energy efficiency and a reduction of fossil carbon emissions by means of waste heat recovery to foster competitiveness, improve security of energy supply and guarantee sustainable production in Europe. The project addresses three sectors, namely brick, pet care/feed and food industry. The results are however of major relevance for a number of other energy-intensive industries such as e.g. pulp and paper industry.The DRYficiency consortium will elaborate technically and economically viable solutions for upgrading idle waste heat streams to process heat streams at higher temperature levels up to 180 °C. The key elements of the solution are two high temperature vapour compression heat pumps: a closed loop heat pump for air drying processes and an open loop heat pump for steam drying processes. The DRYficiency solution will be demonstrated under real production conditions in operational industrial drying processes in three leading European manufacturing companies from the pet food, food and brick industries. The potential of the technology demonstrated is to reduce the specific energy demand for drying and dehydration from 700-800 kWh per ton down to 200 kWh per ton of evaporated water. The energy switch from fossil fuels towards heat pump technology reduces the environmental impact considerably and offers at the same time a potential for energy savings of up to 60-80 %. This will lead to substantial reduction of energy costs and consequently lower specific product costs resulting in a significantly improved competitiveness.