Category: Projects

 LIFT project

 LIFT project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

LIFT will maximise the impact of Coordination and Support Actions (CSAs) by valorising their outcomes and promoting the collaboration among them. Lift aims at identifying gaps to be addressed to ensure a stimulating environment boosting the bio-based economy. In short LIFT will:

  1. Provide a global vision of objectives and results of past and ongoing Coordination and Support Actions
  2. Maximise the impact of CSAs results, and make them actionable by industries and policy makers.
  3. Analyse existing CSA programming gaps and identify challenges to be addressed, through multistakeholders’ collaboration
  4. Raise awareness and communicate the CSAs’ contribution in addressing bioeconomy-related challenges
  5. Provide actionable recommendations and suggestions for new CSA topics for AWP 2020

LIFT will start with thorough mapping of relevant CSAs, the synthesis of their results and the analysis of CSA programming gaps vis-à-vis long-term bio-based industry objectives.

LIFT will cover the identification of all relevant stakeholders and the creation and animation of a network of stakeholders.

Next, LIFT findings and assets will be made readily available, integrated and especially actionable by industries and policy makers. To this end LIFT will unlock bio-economy CSA outputs through an online library, transform LIFT findings and results into Actionable Knowledge, and organise active stakeholder dialogue through Mobilisation and Mutual Learning (MML) workshops. LIFT activities, events, achievements, findings and online library results will be disseminated widely.

The project will culminate in recommendations for future CSA programming contributing to the creation of a stimulating environment for a sustainable, strong and competitive bio-based industry in Europe.

The recommendations will be validated with EC, BIC and BBI JU. They will include clear measures to ensure sustainability and exploitation of results.

The LIFT consortium is industry-led and well- experienced in BBI JU.

Contacts: Alexandre Almeida: alexandre@loba.pt

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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

Website

 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

Website

 ISAAC project

 ISAAC project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

Objective

Although Italy has a great potential for biogas production, many non-technical barriers are still present in the current framework. Some of the limiting factors involve public acceptance of the biogas facilities diffusion, as well as lack of a reliable coordination between different stakeholders. Furthermore, normative and legislative inadequacies and deficiencies haven’t facilitated the implementation of these technologies within the national context.
The main project objective consists on the construction of a communicative model oriented to spread balanced information, based on environmental and economic benefits, between all the actors potentially involved in biogas/biomethane implementation. At the same time, actions will be focused on reducing the fragmentation between farmers, foresters and other stakeholders in order to reach the minimal facility dimension needed, increased biogas and biomethane penetration and reduce cost management.
A participatory process model will be developed as the main project’s approach to reduce social conflict and to include all actors in important common decision making process; starting from the experience, a normative proposal on the participatory process will be recommended.
The effectiveness of the proposal will be maximized applying the actions on specific and restricted areas: the study of the energetic unhatched potential deriving from anaerobic digestion of residual biomass or organic waste will constitute the starting point for communication and information campaigns toward the territory and its stakeholders. The attention will be focused on some high energetic potential regions where the diffusion of these technologies struggles to be realized and the effects of project actions on awareness and acceptance will be evaluated.
In particular, a specific decisional participative model will be implemented and applied in one of the selected districts, as case study, involving in an active way all the stakeholders.

Contacts: Azzeroco2: ricerca@azzeroco2.it

Website

 InnProBio project

 InnProBio project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

For public procurement to become the enabler of the bio-based economy craved by the EU, procurement authorities will need to work collectively and enable procurers to make more informed decisions. The InnProBio project has been clearing the way.

The EU’s confidence in bio-based products seems unshakeable: by 2020, it hopes to be the undisputed leader of a bio-based market worth some EUR 200 billion. The question is, how can this be achieved? Many stakeholders will point at public procurement as a key enabler – especially for niche or still burgeoning markets. But the truth is that procurers and decision makers are not equipped to make the best and most informed decision.

This is where the InnProBio (Forum for Bio-Based Innovation in Public Procurement) project kicks in. By building a community of public purchasers interested in bio-based products, its eight company-strong consortium aimed to help them identify relevant solutions and show them how bio-based products and services can fit into their innovation and procurement actions.

“Creating a community around the hot topics of bio-based products and services (BBPS) and public procurement of innovation (PPI) is important because, as we speak, there is no widespread pool of public procurement practitioners. Such a community would help disseminate information and knowledge and would also lead to an increase in procurement of BBPS and PPI,” says Moritz Westkämper, coordinator of InnProBio on behalf of the German Agency for Renewable Resources (FNR).

This seems only logical: whilst public purchases represent around 14 % of the EU’s GDP, converting this market power into a market pull mechanism requires the public sector to act as a single ‘unit’. This, in turn, can only be achieved with dedicated networks, tools and resources that are currently missing, and InnProBio aimed to fill the gap.

The first step consisted in mapping stakeholder needs: “The workshops that we organised quickly made it clear that there was a need for proper information to be made available in a compact format. This is why we designed an online toolbox containing information for public procurement, a set of factsheets, a glossary and other procurement tools such as tender text blocks, good practice cases and so on,” Westkämper explains.

Another thing that came out was the need for support from management positions (top-down support). The desire to procure sustainable BBPS indeed seemed to be insufficient, and public procurement practitioners would most likely stand to benefit from goals being set out by ministries and governments.

“All in all, we identified a series of barriers: a lack of knowledge of bio-based concepts and market; a lack of procurement methods; a lack of political and management support; a lack of communication within organisations; and other barriers related to costs, industry-specific barriers and a lack of trust,” says Westkämper.

The consortium is confident that the online toolbox, along with workshops and market dialogues, will help remove these barriers. If these are combined with a unified approach and support from management positions to public procurement practitioners, as well better communication within departments and between different procurement departments, they believe that a community of practice could arise and that buying groups could create a market opening for BBPS.

In the long run, the developed tools will help public procurement practitioners look for BBPS and procure them. There is a justified hope that fossil-based products and services will be replaced by BBPS. The public service has such a market power that an established procurement of BBPS could mirror consumer behaviour and thus lead to a sustainable society.

Now that the project has been completed, the InnProBio team intends to use the information material and procurement tools they developed in other EU-funded projects. Project partners are also taking up the results at the national level, with one prominent project being the German national procurement project ‘Nachwachsende Rohstoffe im Einkauf’ supporting the procurement of bio-based products in Germany, which organises workshops and market dialogues. “The project notably created a ‘bio-based office’ which is presented at procurement fairs as a pop-up office. This is a unique opportunity to see and experience first-hand how a bio-based office can look,” Westkämper concludes.

Contacts:

Martin Behrens, Fachagentur Nachwachsende Rohstoffe e.V. (FNR): m.behrens@fnr.de

John Vos, BTG Biomass Technology Group BV: vos@btgworld.com

Website

 ICT BIOCHAIN project

 ICT BIOCHAIN project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

ICT-BIOCHAIN is a project aiming to promote the adoption of ICT, IoT and industry 4.0. solutions to improve the efficiency of biomass value chains. In order to achieve this, it developed a platform to connect stakeholders in the bio-based industry with ICT providers, and it established two Digital Innovation Hubs, located in ready-made, test-bed bioeconomy regions: South-East Ireland and Andalusia (Spain). Leading experts and support networks developed region-specific bio-resource data models and provided access within these hubs to best practices, expert knowledge, and information.

Contacts: Ana I. Martinez: anamartinez@sustainableinnovations.eu  and info@ictbiochain.eu

Website

 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

Website

 GO-GRASS project

 GO-GRASS project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

Grasslands are important for land use in Europe, covering more than a third of the European agricultural area. Grasslands are also diverse in terms of management, yield and biodiversity value, providing forage and other key resources for Europe’s livestock sector. The EU-funded GO-GRASS project will create new opportunities in rural areas based on grassland and green fodder. These will be tested in four EU regions at small scale to ensure wide replication. Within a circular system, the project will develop business models that are circular, sustainable and suitable for remote areas with unexploited resources. The GO-GRASS consortium comprises a multidisciplinary team of 22 partners from 8 European countries (Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, The Netherlands, Romania, Spain, and Sweden).

Contacts: Philipp Grundmann (coordinator): go-grass@atb-potsdam.de
Natalie Höppner (communication & dissemination): nah@esci.eu

Website

 GoDanuBio project

 GoDanuBio project

Posted on by Louis Ferrini
Project concluded

Danube regions and cities face major societal challenges regarding demographic change and brain drain. Rural exodus, loss of opportunities for youth and territorial imbalances are only the tip of the iceberg. However, Danube regions can make a change. A new beginning is possible through multi-level governance and stronger institutional capacities.

The bioeconomy potential of the Danube macro-region is vast. GoDanuBio advocates for the circular bioeconomy as a main tool to revitalize rural areas and establish rural-urban synergies from the Black Forest to the Black Sea. A way ahead is bioeconomising[1] clusters landscapes and value chains, and shaping innovation ecosystems. GoDanuBio inherits the results of DanuBioValNet project (2017-2019) and with a wider thematic scope focuses on participative governance and mutual learning to unleash transformation.

[1] The full deployment of the bioeconomy potential lies in the engagement and participation of all related-industries and stakeholders through the bio-based value chains. Missing gaps should be identified and integrated.

Contacts: Sergi Costa (Coordinator): costa@bio-pro.de

Teodora Atanasova (Communication): teodora.atanasova@brait.bg

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