Author: Louis Ferrini

The European Bioeconomy Network (EUBioNet) is a proactive alliance of EU funded projects dealing with Bioeconomy promotion, communication and support. The main goal is to maximise the efforts, increasing the knowledge sharing, networking, mutual learning, coordination of joint activities and events. The European Bioeconomy Network will work in close collaboration with the European Commission, to ensure that the objectives identified by the Bioeconomy Strategy update will be properly communicated, addressed and implemented.
 STAR-ProBio project

 STAR-ProBio project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

Europe is confronted with depletion of natural resources due to their unsustainable use, increased global competitiveness, increasing population and other environmental and economic challenges. Promoting the sustainable growth of dynamic bioeconomy sectors will contribute to an innovative, resource efficient and competitive Europe in transition from a fossil fuel-based society to a bio-based one. Bio-based products represent a great opportunity to reconcile sustainable long-term growth with environmental protection, a priority of the European Growth Strategy, through the prudent and responsible use of renewable resources for agriculture and industry. Managing those resources and their derived products in a sustainable manner implies major challenges. The development and use of sustainability assessment schemes for bio-based products is expected to contribute to a clear and evidence-based view of the economic, social and environmental impact/benefits of bio-based solutions.

The overall goal of the project was to formulate guidelines for a common framework promoting the development of regulations and standards that support the adoption of business innovation models and market uptake in the bio-based products sector.

This objective was achieved by performing a comprehensive assessment, which looked at the three pillars of sustainability (economic, environmental and social) in a cradle-to-cradle fashion. Proposed methodologies, criteria and indicators have been applied to selected case studies to illustrate benefits and impacts of bio-based products.

At the end of the project, the following results (progress beyond the state of the art) were achieved:

(1)    The SAT-ProBio framework, integrating a refined set of LCA and the hybridized indicators (which create linkages between principles of circular economy and LCA), constitutes a framework that enables an efficient impact-led evaluation.

(2)    The SyD-ProBio model, a system dynamic model for policy analysis.

(3)    A bio-based markets assessment aimed at identifying measures for the market uptake of bio-based products and the relevance of sustainability certification.

Results in these areas allow assessing: social and economic dimensions of sustainability, along with the environmental one; social and economic impact of alternative policy measures; societal aspects (consumers’ behavior, social acceptance, etc.) related to the market penetration of bio-based products.

 

Contacts: Piergiuseppe Morone: piergiuseppe.morone@unitelmasapienza.it

Website

 STAR4BBI project

 STAR4BBI project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

This project will contribute at establishing a coherent, well-coordinated and favourable regulatory / standardization framework for supporting the development of a cutting edge bio-economy for Europe.

More specifically, support to the standardization process for the concrete development of new value chains based on lignocellulosic feedstocks and biomass from forests, from agriculture and from organic waste will be provided.

The main objective of the STAR4BBI project is promoting a level playing field for bio-based products.

The focus of the project will be on finding practical ways to modify regulations in such a way that alternative wording, product specifications, and/or measuring methods will eliminate hurdles without compromising the initial objectives of the standard or regulation.

Contacts: Luana Ladu, TU Berlin: luana.ladu@tu-berlin.de
Minique Vrins, NEN: Minique.Vrins@nen.nl

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 SCALIBUR project

 SCALIBUR project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

Challenge

In the EU over 100 million tonnes of biowaste are thrown away each year. Currently 75% of this goes to landfill or is incinerated, causing major environmental problems: biowaste produces greenhouse gases when it decomposes and contaminates soil and groundwater. Landfilling of biowaste goes against the principle of a circular economy and is a waste of nutrients, energy and potential resources for biobased products.

Solution

In the SCALIBUR project, leading waste management companies, technology developers and research organisations have teamed up with four European cities to demonstrate innovative solutions to transform urban food waste and sewage sludge into high value-added products, helping cities to increase their recycling rate and creating new circular economy business opportunities.

Contacts: James Ling: j.ling@greenovate-europe.eu

Capucine Pineau c.pineau@greenovate-europe.eu

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 RUBIZMO project

 RUBIZMO project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

RUBIZMO will identify business models with high potential for empowering rural communities to take advantage of the opportunities arising from improved value chain optimisation. It will directly supporting the creation of sustainable jobs and growth in rural economies, supporting a multi-actor approach for generation of shared-value. Ultimately, the project looks to contribute to rural development in Europe, supporting the Europe 2020 Strategy for Smart, Sustainable and Inclusive Growth, as well as supporting Regional and Rural Development policy.

To do this, the project will identify innovative business models (developed or identified in existing projects under FP7, H2020, Interreg, Central Europe, etc.) with a significant potential to support modernisation and sustainable growth in rural economies, and relevant to the food sector, bio-based value chains and ecosystem services. Business models with the potential to contribute to the modernisation and sustainable growth of rural economies will be selected, packaged and classified according to their nature, comprising technologies, services, business support structures, financing mechanisms, etc.

This will result in the creation of four practical, user-oriented tools:
– Virtual library of business cases, to inspire and inform potential entrepreneurs about business opportunities;
– Guidelines on creating favourable conditions for the deployment of innovative business models, to help public authorities and rural networks create adequate framework conditions for rural innovation;
– Toolkit for clustering and network development in rural areas;
– Transformation support tool, to help individual entrepreneurs understand which business models are best adapted to their situation, and how to go about implementing change.

The project will then prepare Europe-wide upscaling and replication in rural areas using real life cases, taking account of the complexity of transferring value chains.

Contacts: Justin Casimir: justin.casimir@ri.se
Daniel Lissoni d.lissoni@greenovate-europe.eu

Website

Virtual Library

Youtube channel

 RoadToBio project

 RoadToBio project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

RoadToBio will deliver a roadmap that will specify the benefits for the chemical industry along the path towards a bioeconomy to meet the societal needs in 2030. The roadmap will contain the following two main components:

(1) An analysis of the most promising opportunities (sweet spots) for the chemical industry to increase its bio-based portfolio, as well as the technological and commercial barriers and the hurdles in regulations and acceptance by society, governing bodies and the industry itself.

(2) A strategy, action plan and engagement guide to overcome the existing and anticipated barriers and hurdles as mentioned above. Furthermore it will bring together different parts of chemical industry, society, and governing bodies, to start a dialogue and to create a platform where this action plan can unfold its full potential, in order to help meet the very ambitious targets of the BIC for 2030.

The approach is based on three pillars, which are

(a) analysis of status quo and potentials,
(b) forward looking activities,
(c) continuous feedback loops and interactions with stakeholders.

The results will be wrapped up and phrased as a roadmap and an engagement guide describing the benefits and a way forward for the European Chemical Industry towards a more bio-based future. In order to derive a holistic roadmap that can lead the way, the analytical part of the project will consider feedstocks, technologies and markets as well as regulatory issues, societal needs, consumer questions and communication.

The consortium partners bring in complementary expertise in relevant fields of the bioeconomy and chemical industry, covering in depth all aspects that need to be included in the roadmap. All partners have been or are still actively involved in successfully completed and ongoing FP7, H2020, and BBI projects on different aspects of the bioeconomy, as well as in several groups and committees working on political or standardization aspects of bio-based products.

Contacts: Lea König: lea.koenig@dechema.de

Website

 PRO-ENRICH project

 PRO-ENRICH project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

The Pro-Enrich project will develop a flexible biorefinery approach able to processing a range of agricultural residues from rapeseed meal, olives, tomatoes and citrus fruit industries. This will help fulfil the growing global demand for alternative sources of protein and phenolic product streams.

The Pro-Enrich project will develop a flexible biorefinery approach able to processing a range of agricultural residues from rapeseed meal, olives, tomatoes and citrus fruit industries. This will help fulfil the growing global demand for alternative sources of protein and phenolic product streams.

Pro-Enrich take the process of fractionising biomass to a new level, identifying proteins, polyphenols, dietary fibres and pigments for use as food ingredients, pet food, cosmetics and adhesives.

Contacts: Africa Matilda Pardavila Morris: africa.pardavila@innovarum.es

Website

 ProBIO project

 ProBIO project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

ProBIO is a support action directly benefiting consortia of FP7 KBBE and H2020 bioeconomy. The overall objective is two-fold:

  1. To support the flow of knowledge-based bioeconomy project results from research to market, as well as back to R&I.
  2. To foster the networking and knowledge exchange between different European bioeconomy initiatives under H2020 and FP7 and the most important players in the field thus raising awareness towards policy makers and engaging the general public.

To achieve its objectives, ProBIO screens all 411 KBBE projects for results, describes them in interaction with the KBBE consortia, and finally classifies each result according to its nature. The results will be of different technological maturity level: some will be mature for direct market introduction, others need further development to reach a higher TRL, and some are not technological results, but knowledge and instruments of relevance to policy makers.
The ProBIO experts take this diverse nature and maturity level of research results into account and support each type of result with dedicated professional coaching and tools with a view to:

  1. Accelerating market entry through business coaching of the most promising R&D results
  2. Facilitating the flow of knowledge into new R&I projects in order to reach a higher TRL level
  3. Feeding policy-relevant results into the political process to inform policy making

ProBIO also foresees a range of events and communication activities supporting knowledge exchange and linkage of different actors along the bioeconomy value chains and making use of synergies through networking.

The multi-disciplinary team of the ProBIO consortium is built around highly specialised green innovation consultancies and a European expert group who together have an outstanding track record in promoting the uptake of results from public research. Additional thematic expertise is ensured by two technical centres, and communication is in professional hands, too.

Contacts: Ilaria Bonetti: ilaria.bonetti@mi.camcom.it

Website

 POWER4BIO project

 POWER4BIO project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

POWER4BIO project aims at empowering regional stakeholders to boost the transition towards bioeconomy regions in Europe by providing them with the necessary tools, instruments and guidance to develop and implement sound sustainable bioeconomy strategies. In particular, POWER4BIO will define a methodology based on a 3-steps approach (stakeholders engagement, regional analysis and strategy development) to guide European regions when preparing and reviewing their regional bioeconomy strategy and its associated implementation plan (roadmap), and which will be ultimately integrated in a Bioregional Strategy Accelerator Toolkit.

POWER4BIO will also develop a catalogue of bio-based business models, including best practice examples, to support regions understand, identify and select the most adequate bio-based solutions for developing their bioeconomy and; POWER4BIO will issue recommendations to use and align the main funding instruments and policies in Europe to support bioeconomy business models.

Moreover, POWER4BIO will rely on a comprehensive programme to foster mutual learning and intra- and interregional collaboration and networking among regional stakeholders to ensure knowledge transfer across sectors and regions and to jointly develop and complement different sustainable bioeconomy value chains within 10 participant regions member of the consortium (5 of which coming from Central and Eastern Europe) from 9 different countries.

Finally, POWER4BIO will design and deliver an ambitious training programme to increase the skills and capacity of the regional stakeholders in several important aspects of the bioeconomy (sustainability in the bio-based value chains, synergies in funding instruments, technology transfer and entrepreneurship, etc.). All in all, the potential brought in the project is huge, considering that the 10 participant regions represent a population of around 88 million people, a GDP of 2460 billion EUR and an area of almost 450,000 km2.

Contacts: Ignacio Martin: imartin@fcirce.es 
Christine Beusch: beusch@e-p-c.de

Website

 Pilots4U project

 Pilots4U project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

Pilots4U is a very visible, easy accessible network of open access pilot and multipurpose demo-infrastructures for the European bio-economy with Europe-wide coverage and protecting IP rights of users. Since pilot- and demo equipment is very expensive and requires specific expertise, open access infrastructures are the most cost-effective manner to support the deployment of industry-driven innovations in the market.

To assure that the network meets the needs of the European bio-economy industry (SMEs, start-ups, Large enterprises), current European pilot and demo-capabilities are continuously

compared with the needs of the European biobased industry.   Different cooperation schemes for the open access pilot- and demo-networkare hereby considered.

Pilots4U is there to help innovators, companies and research institutions operating in the bio-economy sector to gain easier access to more than 100 shared testing facilities and scale-up their technology faster and cheaper towards the market.

Contacts:

Stef Denayer Stakeholder Relations Manager Pilots4U stef.denayer@bbeu.org mob +32 475 820300

Website

 NUTRIMAN project

 NUTRIMAN project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

Objective

Agriculture and food industry having a high dependence on resources in their production and striving for long-term sustainability. In this context there is an urgent need to optimise resource use and smooth the transition to a knowledgedriven agriculture. The NUTRIMAN is a Nitrogen and Phosphorus thematic network compiling knowledge “ready for practice” for such recovered product applications, practices and technologies, interconnecting applied science and industrial practice, for the user interest and benefits of the agricultural practitioners. There is an urgent need to spread knowledge and network information towards agricultural practitioners about the insufficiently exploited N/P recovery innovative research results (technologies, products, practices). The project objective is to improve the exploitation of the N/P nutrient management/recovery potential for the ready for practice cases not sufficiently known by practitioners. Our action will open new opportunities for farmers to develop connections between applied researches with practical usefulness results and farming practice in the priority area of nutrient management and nutrient recovery. Uses a bottom-up approach to identify incentives and bottlenecks for adoption and to prioritise between technologies/products and will ensure larger willingness to adopt innovations and improve multiplicator effects. Large scale take up of the recovered N/P innovative fertilisers targeted, produced from un-exploited resources of organic or secondary raw materials in line with the circular economy model, and economical/environmental efficiently used by farmers. Effective dissemination and exploitation promoted by multilingual web platform, other communications and best practice field demonstrations for farmers. This action is contributing to the successful deployment of the vast reservoir of existing scientific/practical knowledge on the N/P recovery theme, including multi lingual abstracts in EIP-AGRI format.

Contacts: Edward Someus: edward@terrenum.net

Website