Descrizione del progetto
Contribuire a salvare gli oceani producendo plastica a partire dal latte
Più di 8 milioni di tonnellate di rifiuti plastici finiscono ogni anno negli oceani. Anche nel caso del latte ogni anno vengono scartati 6 milioni di tonnellate, che diventano rifiuti. Il progetto SP-Milk, finanziato dall’UE, sta lavorando per invertire questa tendenza. SP-Milk ha trovato un modo per convertire il latte scaduto in una plastica biologica e biodegradabile. Il campo applicativo bersaglio della bioplastica di SP-Milk è l’industria della plastica monouso. In particolare, SP-Milk verrà immesso sul mercato sotto forma di granuli per essere utilizzato dalle aziende attive nella lavorazione della plastica tramite l’impiego di macchinari di stampaggio per iniezione e per compressione, oppure allo scopo di produrre pellicole per applicazioni di imballaggio industriale.
Obiettivo
The global plastic production reached up to 448 million tons in 2018, of which approximately 8 million tons are entering into the oceans every year. The imprudent use of plastics in our everyday life elevated plastics into the major pollutant component of the world seas and oceans. At the same time, every year in Europe 3-6 million tons of milk are thrown away as waste. Splastica is an innovative startup and a spin off from University of Rome Tor Vergata founded in 2019, whose CEO is a woman, which found an innovative way to turn expired milk into a biobased and biodegradable plastic, by means of a patented process. This bioplastic has been widely characterized, showing good hardness, resistance and great stability in a wide range of temperatures, and in contact with food, water, detergents.
The single-use plastic industry is the target field of application of SP-Milk bioplastic. Single-use plastics, often also referred to as disposable plastics, are commonly used for plastic packaging and include items intended to be used only once. The recent EU Directive 2019/904, the SUP Directive, imposes, from July 2021, EU wide market restriction measures (bans) for various single-use products such as plastic cutlery, plates, stirrers and straws, oxo-degradable plastics and expanded polystyrene food and drink containers. SPlastica business idea is to bring to the market SP-Milk bioplastic in the form of granules to be used by plastic processing companies with injection moulding and compression moulding machines or to produce films for industrial packaging applications. Project Objectives within the Women TechEU program are: the optimization of the bioplastic formulation to assess its machinability with industrial machines; the material certifications (bioplastic material; compostability; material in contact with food); the study and design the wastewater treatment system inherent to the SP-Milk production process and the layout of a industrial scale plant.
Campo scientifico
Programma(i)
- HORIZON.3.2 - European innovation ecosystems Main Programme
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
HORIZON-AG-LS - HORIZON Lump Sum GrantCoordinatore
00045 ROMA
Italia
L’organizzazione si è definita una PMI (piccola e media impresa) al momento della firma dell’accordo di sovvenzione.