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CORDIS

Circular Initiative for Recycling and waste Conversion into Lactate Extracts

Project description

Revolutionary retrofitted biorefinery for food waste valorisation

Many organisations and countries encourage developing novel, clean solutions and innovations to overcome climate change. Food waste represents a large percentage of global waste and is neither recycled nor used on a large enough scale. With this in mind, the EU-funded CIRCLE project aims to develop and demonstrate a revolutionary retrofitted bio-refinery that will valorise food waste streams into energy and high-value bio-based chemicals and intermediates. The resulting facilities, which can be replicated anywhere in the world, will enable the creation of renewable energy to power the production of crucial chemicals like lactic acid, polylactic acid, and their derived products. This approach will showcase high efficiency and significantly impact GHG emissions and pollution.

Objective

CIRCLE aims at demonstrating at industrial scale a first-of-its-kind retrofitted biorefinery for the valorisation of food waste streams and additional biomasses into high-value bio-based chemicals and intermediates, lactic acid (LA) as well as derived products, including polylactic acid (PLA), upgrading and expanding the production capacity of an existing biogas plant.
The upgrade proposed will valorise the food waste streams currently processed for biogas production to produce LA ready for downstream high-value applications, including the production of PLA and derived new and higher-value products. The process will take advantage of the existing facility and of the renewable energy (biogas and heat) directly produced, thus making the production highly energy efficient. The proposed technology is highly scalable and replicable as it is designed to be deployed as an ‘add-on’ to existing food waste processing infrastructures. CIRCLE will reach the TRL8 by the end of the project by demonstrating the production of raw LA, which will be then converted into clean lactate salt (CLS) and into industrial and polymer-grade LA (≥ 95-99%). The polymer-grade LA will be in turn polymerized into a recyclable PLA, which can replace fossil-based polypropylene (PP) in a wide range of applications, with a significant impact on GHG emissions and environmental pollution avoidance.
The application of bio-based chemicals and intermediates will be demonstrated through the production of a wide portfolio of bio-based products fully compliant with market requirements, such as cover cosmetics products (for CLS and LA), cleaning products (for LA) as well as the automotive, cosmetics and food packaging sectors (for PLA).
The new circular value chain is expected to generate €20M of turnover and ca. 50 jobs. Retrofitting the existing biorefinery will allow saving at least 10% of the CAPEX.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

Keywords

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Funding Scheme

HORIZON-JU-IA - HORIZON JU Innovation Actions

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Call for proposal

(opens in new window) HORIZON-JU-CBE-2023

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Coordinator

TRIPLE W LTD
Net EU contribution
€ 10 818 000,00
Address
GIBOREI ISRAEL 7
4250407 Netanya
Israel
SME
Yes
Activity type
Private for-profit entities (excluding Higher or Secondary Education Establishments)
Links
Total cost
€ 22 895 000,00

Participants (15)

Partners (2)