Category: Industrial roadmaps

 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

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 Lifecab project

 Lifecab project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

Biowaste management has become a major issue because of the increasing amount of biowastes. These stem from increasing polulation urbanization and consumption habits. Current biowaste management practices are based on fermentation and incineration technologies. These practices produce biogas, compost, thermal and electrical energy. The processing costs exceed the sale value of the products and/or raise issues connected to their secondary environmental impact. Based on previous research work1 carried out by the University of Torino in cooperation with Acea Pinerolese Spa located in Pinerolo (TO), LIFECAB will demontrate in real operational a new process to treat municipal biowaste (MBW) and produce soluble biorganic substances (SBO). These substances will be used as additives for anaerobic fermentation reactors to improve the economy and environmental impact of the current fermentation technology.

The new process, developed at small laboratory pilot level (www.biochemenergy.it), is based on the chemical hydrolysis of fermented MBW in water. It yields all marketable products. It allows recycling all reagents and water. It produces no secondary waste and process effluents needing disposal. Moreover, the SBO have been shown multipurpose products for potential use in the chemical industry, agriculture and animal husbandry. These findings prospect that a MBW treatment plant may be turned into a biorefinery producing biofuel and value added biobased products. Most recent laboratory studies have proven that the addition of 0.05-2% SBO to the MBW organic humid fraction (OHF) fermentation slurry decrease the ammonia content of the digestate, while maintaining biogas production and quality. The effect is presumably due to the capacity of SBO to promote oxidation of ammonia to N2.

Based on the above premises, LIFECAB is a pilot/demonstated project aiming to validate at TRL 7 previous research. This will be achieved by pursuing three main objectives:

  1. validating the SBO production process in real operational conditions;
  2. validating the new SBO assisted anaerobic fermentation process;
  3. demonstrating a new business model, which allows the valorization of biowastes through integrated biochemical and chemical processes in real operational environment with reduced entrepreneurial risk.

Contacts: Enzo Montoneri: enzo.montoneri@gmail.com
Sorani Montenegro: sorani.montenegro@hysytech.com
Simone Solaro: simone.solaro@hysytech.com

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 ISABEL project

 ISABEL project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

Objective

Community energy sits high in the energy policy agenda as an inseparable part of the strategy towards a low-carbon EU economy. Sustainable biogas technologies have been extremely slow in catching up with community energy developments, failing to benefit from their undeniable potential. ISABEL aims to remove the obstacles and to promote community biogas in the EU by bringing out its societal relevance and by joining forces with a major revolutionary movement – Social Innovation. To achieve and sustain this transition, ISABEL employs modern marketing research to understand the needs and cultural diversities of the communities, fuses Social Innovation to reposition Biogas from an economic bio-fuel carrier to a social good, to come up with new community concepts and to build a stronger and wider community engagement in support of biogas. We zoom in on specific areas with diverse interest and we support communities on the ground to realize community biogas plans in coordination with all the stakeholders, slashing transaction overheads. We bring communities together to exchange and inspire each other as we carefully steer them towards quality sustainability and impact assessment principles. We zoom out to inform the policy world about what works and what does not, what should change and how we can scale-up, replicate and innovate in order to make investments more attractive. We envision a more innovative, better connected, less sensitive to policy and more transparent community biogas movement which will serve as a spring of ideas for other renewable energy technologies.
But we start simple – we want more ideas, more and deeper public involvement, more responsible community biogas plans and more bold and fair policies; and we bring along a highly complementary team of practical minded people to do it.

Contacts: Iakovos Delioglanis: delioglanis@qplan.gr

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 GREENPROTEIN project

 GREENPROTEIN project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

GreenProtein is an European project which aims at a major innovation in the fields of protein production and food loss reduction in the EU by producing high-added value, food-grade functional proteins and other ingredients, out of green field waste.

The general objective of the GreenProtein project, that gathers 7 different European partners during 4.5 years, is to establish a demo plant for the extraction and purification of functional RuBisCo protein isolate at industrial scale. GreenProtein will demonstrate the technical and economic feasibility of the revalorisation of green residues from existing agroindustry.

The demo plant is design so it is a replicable system with a high spreading projection in the whole EU.

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

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 EMBRACED project

 EMBRACED project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

Objective

A sizeable category in terms of organic content within MSW is represented by Absorbent Hygiene Products (AHPs; e.g. nappies, adult incontinence products, feminine hygiene items, wipes, etc.) waste, which is currently considered as non-recyclable fraction of MSW and finds its way to landfills or incineration, leading to important environmental concerns. Indeed, each year 8,500,000 tons of such waste are incinerated or landfilled in Europe (the equivalent of almost 30 landfills every year), and over 30,000,000 tons in the world. AHP are mainly composed of a mix of natural fibres (cellulose) and polymers (PP/PE and superabsorbent polymer), valuable materials that currently don’t find a proper valorization. Within EMBRACED project, a first-of-its-kind multi-purpose integrated biorefinery will be established in order to valorize in a relevant environment scenario the cellulosic fractions obtained from AHP waste towards the production of bio-products of significant commercial interest, and – concurrently – high added-value co-products, such polyolefinic plastics and SAP (superabsorbent polymers).
This innovative biorefinery model will involve all the main actors of the whole value chain, from AHP consumers and local population to waste management and logistic companies, leading AHP producers and bioprocess developers, as well as final products developers. In a view of circular economy, all the fractions obtained from the processed AHP waste will be reused through valorization into final products, and in particular the high-quality cellulosic fraction of AHP (ca. 1,275,000 ton/y in Europe), which has significant advantages vs. traditional 2nd generation lignocellulosic feedstocks in terms of homogeneity and downstream bioprocessing costs, will be converted and valorized in two parallel value chains, leading to the production of biobased building blocks, polymers and fertilizers.

Contacts: Orsola Bolognani: embraced@fatergroup.com

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