Webinar highlights Rehap’s progress in biomass feedstock and valorisation for the EU Responding to the ambitious targets set in the EU’s Europe 2020 strategy of sustainable patterns of consumption and production, Rehap is an EU-funded project facilitating a significant step towards a better use of natural resources by creating novel materials from agricultural and forestry waste, whilst decreasing the use of fossil resources and energy in the process industry. Climate Change and Environment Industrial Technologies Energy © Rehap The project recently held its first webinar, Biomass feedstock and valorisation: An introduction and insight into transforming agroforestry waste into high added-value commercial and sustainable products developed by the REHAP project. The webinar took a close look at the progress being made after two years working on biomass feedstock and valorisation. Aitor Barrio, Rehap project coordinator from TECNALIA, led the webinar providing a streamlined detailed overview of the technical objectives of Rehap and how it will demonstrate turning waste into reliable and sustainable applications later to be demonstrated as a prototype structure. To provide a picture of the processes and regulations in sourcing this agroforestry waste material, Lars Wietschel from the University of Augsburg discussed the state-of-the-art on agroforestry residues and the forecasting results of their 2030 waste potentials. Discussing the optimisation of these biomass waste stream processing and upscaling, Tarja Tamminen, researcher at VTT, explained the novel approach developed to utilise bark by soda/kraft cooking away from the hot water bark extraction traditionally used in the industry. Andrea Leoncini from RINA Consulting followed by providing a comprehensive look at the project’s market analysis and impact through the life cycle approach. This provided an extremely interesting picture of how Rehap is hoping to sustainably develop and implement these processes for a greener building sector. During the webinar poll questions were asked to the audience of professionals in companies and institutions such as the pulp and paper industry, biorefineries, forest proprietaries, sawmills and those in the chemical industries or phenolic resin manufacturing for example. Interesting data was revealed on how they saw the progress and wide-scale adoption across Europe in the uptake of bio-based products over their fossil-based equivalents. These questions, and the results, along with the webinar on demand, can be found here: https://www.workcast.com/register?cpak=5743213918905875 This is the first in a series of Rehap webinars. Sign up to the newsletter (http://www.rehap.eu/newsletters/) to be the first to hear about the second edition. For any questions regarding the webinar on the project, please contact Amelia: amelia@ipl.eu.com
