ELLIPSE – Efficient and Novel Waste Streams Co-Processing to Obtain Bio-Based Solutions for Packaging and Agricultural Sectors

ELLIPSE project will address the valorisation of two heterogeneous waste streams generated in significant amounts in Europe, slaughterhouse waste (bellygrass or rumen content) and paper and pulp sludge, to produce cost-efficient polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) for agricultural and personal care applications, by the coprocessing with other organic wastes (OW) such as sludge from the dairy industry and glycerol from the biodiesel industry, as well as recovering nutrients to produce bio-based fertilizers (BBFs).

The integration of these waste streams as biorefinery feedstocks will allow reducing the volumes of landfilled waste, opening new avenues for platform chemicals and bioplastics production while creating additional revenue for the related industries generating them, with added advantages of water recycling, decreased soil degradation, groundwater pollution and methane emissions.

The ELLIPSE project has posed several ambitious objectives to reach:

To apply effective pre-treatments for heterogeneous paper and slaughterhouse waste
To improve the yield of VFA production in acidogenic fermentation
To obtain PHBV copolymers through efficient and sustainable processes
To obtain different PHBV grades according to the requirements of the final applications in the personal care and agricultural sectors
To obtain PHBV-based compounds and wet compounds and demonstrate their performance through the production of prototypes for personal care and agricultural applications
To validate enzymatic and chemical recycling to recover monomers that will be reincorporated into the production process
To recover nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorous) to be used as bio-based fertilizers
To demonstrate environmental and socio-economic sustainability of new biobased compounds/products and guarantee the safety of the new circular bioprocesses
To apply/adapt mature/novel digital technologies
To maximize the innovation impact by contributing to the dissemination post-project
To determine public awareness and acceptance of bio-based polymers and to support acceptance of scalable bio-based solutions.

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Take a peek at the project brochure!

Project Coordinator

AIMPLAS - Asociacion de investigacion de materiales plasticos y conexas, Spain

Project Partners

Biobase Europe pilot plant vzw, Belgium
Biotrend-inovacao e engenharia em Biotecnologia SA, Portugal
Novamont SPA, Italy
Bio-mi drustvo s ogranicenom odgovornoscu za proizvodnju istrazivanjei Razvoj, Croatia
Fundacion Cartif, Spain
Zero Emission Engineering BV, The Netherlands
University of Verona, Italy
Helian Polymers, The Netherlands
RWM Rouleaux Holding, The Netherlands
EnCo SRL, Italy
Best - bioenergy and Sustainable technologies GMBH, Austria
Green Generation Ireland Limited, Ireland
Laarkirchen Papier AG, Austria

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