Description du projet
Transformer les déchets alimentaires en produits de valeur
Le gaspillage alimentaire est l’un des plus grands problèmes auxquels la société d’aujourd’hui se trouve confrontée. Les aliments sont envoyés en grandes quantités dans des décharges où ils se décomposent lentement en méthane et en dioxyde de carbone. La digestion anaérobie, qui transforme ces résidus en biogaz, offre une voie durable pour valoriser l’énorme potentiel inexploité des déchets alimentaires. Toutefois, l’utilisation de ces rebuts comme matière première dans les bioraffineries n’en est qu’à ses débuts. Le projet UP-GRAD, financé par l’UE, entend améliorer les performances et la stabilité de la digestion anaérobie en mettant au point un processus en deux étapes à base de lactate. En combinant les connaissances de différents domaines: ingénierie environnementale, biochimie, microbiologie, écogénomique, transcriptomique, bioinformatique et économie, le projet espère promouvoir des solutions pratiques pour les bioraffineries de déchets alimentaires de la prochaine génération.
Objectif
Food waste (FW) and plastic pollution represent two of the most relevant environmental, economic and societal problems in this XXI century. Anaerobic digestion (AD) of FW linked with biogas bioconversion into biopolymers constitute a sustainable route to valorise the enormous untapped potential of FW. However, the full-scale implementation of FW-AD biogas based biorefineries is still limited by the need to enhance stability and prevent inhibition during FW-AD and to overcome the CH4 mass transfer and biological limitations encountered in methanotrophic processes. UP-GRAD aims at upgrading the performance and stability of FW-AD by engineering a novel 2-stage lactate-based AD process coupled with the development of innovative cost-competitive strategies for improving biogas valorisation as a feedstock for the synthesis of tailor-made, high-quality, marketable biopolymers. In this context, UP-GRAD will focus on the enrichment of both industrially robust hydrolytic-acidogenic lactate fermenting inocula and mixed biopolymer-accumulating methanotrophic consortia, and on the optimisation of integrated AD processes and novel high mass transfer nanobubble bioreactors. State-of-art molecular assays devoted to bringing a deeper understanding of the ecological factors tuning metabolic pathways and performance, and of the structure and functionality of the communities involved in the hydrolytic-acidogenic, methanogenic and methanotrophic stages will be conducted during an academic secondment. In addition, a techno-economic analysis and technology-uptake roadmap will be performed during a secondment in an international FW management company. UP-GRAD will apply a cross-disciplinary approach, involving environmental engineering, biochemistry, microbiology, ecogenomics, transcriptomics, bioinformatics and economics, allowing the candidate to create, disseminate and apply a new knowledge that will foster practical solutions for next-generation AD and flexible biogas biorefineries.
Champ scientifique
- engineering and technologyenvironmental biotechnologybioremediationbioreactors
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomics
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineering
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmicrobiology
- engineering and technologyindustrial biotechnologybioprocessing technologiesfermentation
Mots‑clés
Programme(s)
Régime de financement
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinateur
47002 VALLADOLID
Espagne