Objective
Bioplastics like PHA are long-term sustainable alternatives because they can show equal performance to conventional petrochemical plastics, originate from renewable non-food resources and are 100% bio-degradable. Although PHA shows better performance than alternative bioplastics (PLA and starch), the market uptake of PHA biosplastics shows the following obstacles: 1) PHA is expensive (>4.5 €/kg), much higher than starch plastics and other bio-based polyesters. This is caused by three facts in the production process: High raw material costs; expensive PHA extraction to ensure high quality; small production volumes. The second obstacle is the 2) Small market share of European PHA (dominated by China and US) that limits the potential of a European Bioeconomy. EuroPHA will solve the need to establish a competitive PHA production capacity in Europe by: a) Reduction of PHA production costs: using low-value feedstock (agro-food waste/surplus streams) as starting material in three-phase biological synthesis of PHA by mixed microbial culture; b) Environmentally friendly & cost-effective PHA extraction step; c) Novel formulations of PHA for 100% complete and short-time biodegradability packaging bioplastics by current industrial technology: monolayer film and extrusion foam for food packaging. EuroPHA will provide these economic benefits for Europe by our project members: 40% reduction of final price (≈2.6€/kg), this will enable the increase of European PHA global market share from current 0.1% to 15% in five years post project (45 ktpa worth 135€ million) for food packaging applications. Price-competitiveness vs. starch-based (today 3.75 €/k) and PLA (2.5€/kg) making possible to penetrate a 20% in the starch-plastic market (22 kpta with revenues of 90€ million) and 15% in the PLA market (23 kpta worth 50€ million) in five years post project. Turnover of 50€ million from 20kpta production in five years post project for new applications.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- engineering and technologyindustrial biotechnologybiomaterialsbioplasticspolylactic acid
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicsbioeconomy
- engineering and technologyother engineering and technologiesfood technologyfood packaging
- engineering and technologyindustrial biotechnologybiomaterialsbioplasticspolyhydroxyalkanoates
You need to log in or register to use this function
We are sorry... an unexpected error occurred during execution.
You need to be authenticated. Your session might have expired.
Thank you for your feedback.
You will soon receive an email to confirm the submission. If you have selected to be notified about the reporting status, you will also be contacted when the reporting status will change.
Call for proposal
FP7-SME-2013
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
BSG-SME-AG - Research for SME associations/groupingsCoordinator
30002 Murcia
Spain