Effectively converting heterogenous organic materials into bio-based building blocks
Biowaste management has become a growing challenge in Europe in recent decades. One of the EU 2025 recycling targets states that the preparing for reuse and the recycling of municipal and all packaging waste should increase to 55%. With the majority of Member States struggling to meet this target, more time and cost-efficient solutions seem to be urgently in need. In many cases, biowaste is under-valorised as the applied technologies of anaerobic digestion (AD) or composting result in rather low-value outputs, such as compost and biogas. These outputs offer only nutrient recovery and energy recovery, respectively. While biomass is largely available, there is a lack of integrated knowledge related to the combined transformation of several heterogeneous biomass sources into added-value compounds to reach economies of scale. The EU-funded CAFIPLA project developed an integrated pre-treatment process to convert all kinds of organic material– such as municipal biowaste– into building blocks for the biobased economy.
A groundbreaking method applicable to different types of biowaste
“The CAFIPLA biomass loop is a great step forward for the efficient treatment and material upcycling of heterogeneous municipal biowaste beyond biogas and compost,” explains Marie-Aline Pierrard, project manager at IDELUX Environnement, the Belgian public waste treatment facility operating the pilot programme. CAFIPLA links two innovative platform approaches, the Carboxylic Acid Platform (CAP) and the Fibre Recovery Platform (FRP), to create the CAFIPLA biomass loop. The CAP converts the easily degradable fraction of organic biowaste into short-chain carboxylic acids (SCCA) which can be used as precursors for the biotechnological production of PHBV biopolymer, microbial protein as well as transformed into medium-chain carboxylic acids (MCCA), such as caproic acid, via chain elongation. The fibres can be recovered from the remaining fraction and have huge application potential in bio-composites or in the construction sector.
Towards a contemporary integrated biorefinery
“The most innovative aspect of CAFIPLA is that it allows the transformation of heterogeneous biowaste streams into precursors for the bioeconomy,” stresses project coordinator Thomas Dietrich, researcher at TECNALIA. The combination of the two platform approaches significantly improves biomass pre-treatment. Moreover, the CAP relies on dark fermentation which can be easily integrated into existing biowaste treatment facilities, such as anaerobic digestion and composting and lead to efficient material upcycling as required by a circular bioeconomy. “The CAFIPLA results would be ideally implemented at an existing AD Facility as in this case the biomass logistic is already implemented and the basic knowledge required for operating the platform approaches exists,” concludes Dietrich. “The next steps foreseen are to further upscale the two platforms to TRL 7 and to provide bigger amounts of intermediates, such as SCCA and fibres, to interested industrial stakeholders for application development thereby increasing the market demand for our precursors for the bioeconomy.” The project’s implementation guideline provides valuable insights into the CAFIPLA technology, bringing attention to the key factors of novel biowaste valorisation on a regional level. The team is currently focusing on the dissemination of non-confidential results and the interaction with stakeholders to exchange knowledge and develop business models regarding the economic opportunities upon implementation of the CAFIPLA pre-treatment strategy.
Keywords
CAFIPLA, biowaste, biomass, pre-treatment, building blocks, anaerobic digestion, carboxylic acids, upcycling, provincial biowaste
