After more than 5 years of work and facing difficulties as the COVID pandemic, the DECISIVE project led to numerous and interesting results as well as promising outlooks for the future:
• Definition of the DECISIVE concept, system and solution:
The DECISIVE concept is a concept that proposes the treatment of biowaste in urban areas in a decentralized way. It relies on three fundamental elements: The decentralization of biowaste management within urban areas; The closing of carbon, energy, and nutrients in short loops; The integration of technologies at small scale. The “DECISIVE system” is defined as a food waste management system that uses anaerobic digestion at small scale, as the main treatment technology for biowaste in a determined urban area. A “DECISIVE solution” is a DECISIVE system that includes a perimeter of external services to complete its value proposition.
• Key DECISIVE products:
The first key products concern organizational tools. The first tool is DST, developed to diagnose the current biowaste management of diverse urban locations and compare with scenario including decentralised management by the DECISIVE system; this tool is already freely available. The second tool is an optimisation-modelling tool to plan the locations where DECISIVE solution may be implemented. This tool is still in a development TRL 4-5 and its improvement will continue. The second type of products concerns technologies: A new pateted mAD process implementing a dry digestion has been proposed and demonstrated through a 100L-pilot. The stirling engine technology has been successfully downscaled to adapt to mAD and is available for market delivery. Finally, the solid substrate fermentation proved to be a performing way to produce biopesticide from digestate.
• Assessment of the DECISIVE concept sustainability
A method to assess the system value from growth positive targets, addressing all dimensions of sustainability, including regulatory enablers and barriers for implementing integrated urban food waste-based biorefineries and urban farming systems has been developed. It consists in a conceptual framework that was applied to perform system level assessment of the DECISIVE demonstration sites, with results proving the environmental benefit of a decentralised biowaste management as well as the condition for ensuring economic sustainability. This assessment led to propose alternative regulatory mechanisms to support transitions in a green economy.
• Demonstration of the feasibility of DECISIVE solution implementation and its impact on waste prevention
This demonstration was achieved on the LYON demonstration site (France), which was based on a pilot developed by ENWISE was designed to treat 50 t of biowaste per year. The demonstration operation gave a lot of information on the flexibility of a decentralised solution. Moreover it led to a positive appraisal of the feasibility of the DECISIVE concept (administrative procedure + treatment set-up + biowaste supply), with a good technical assessment of the valorisation system and proved the relevance of the micro-anaerobic digestion even at the lowest scale of 50 tonnes of biowaste treated per year. Moreover, in all places where the DECISIVE solution implementation was studied (Lyon, Dolina, UAB campus in Spain) the waste characterizations led to interesting conclusions about the quality of the collected biowaste, the part of avoidable biowaste in the collection, the positive role of sorting and local treatment in terms of prevention.
• Business models for the future
Success and constraining factors for outcomes of the DECISIVE project have been studied highlighting the need for new business models and support of legislation for the DECISIVE concept. It also underlined the need for end-users involvement, positive perception of products from the micro-anaerobic digestion and benefits from the decentralised system in order to ensure acceptance. This first study enabled then to draw fundamentals elements that define the value proposition and a Go-To-Market strategy for a decentralised biowaste management solution based on the DECISIVE system. this strategy clearly states the DECISIVE solution is a complementary solution to centralized biowaste management. A first market section for the DECISIVE solution should be commercial and industrial biowaste producers, whereas households should be targeted later with more return on experience.
