AIMPLAS Coordinates a New EU Project to Valorize Slaughterhouse Waste and Paper and Pulp Sludge for Agricultural and Personal Care Applications

AIMPLAS, the Plastics Technology Centre, coordinates a new European project to valorize slaughterhouse waste (bellygrass or rumen content) and paper and pulp sludge, to produce cost-efficient polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) for agricultural and personal care applications, by the coprocessing with other organic wastes (OW) such as sludge from the dairy industry and glycerol from the biodiesel industry, as well as recovering nutrients to produce bio-based fertilizers (BBFs).

On 17^th-18^th May AIMPLAS hosted the ELLIPSE project Kick-off Meeting (KoM) to show the different activities to be performed during the project timeframe. This research is funded by the European Union under the Circular Bio-based Joint Undertaking (CBE JU) call HORIZON-JU-CBE-2022-IA-04. For its deployment it has been allocated 5,509,655.50€ over a 48-months period.

The ELLIPSE project will address the valorization of two heterogeneous waste streams generated in significant amounts in Europe, slaughterhouse waste and paper and pulp sludge, for agricultural and personal care applications. The integration of these waste streams as biorefinery feedstocks will allow reducing the volumes of landfilled waste, opening new avenues for platform chemicals and bioplastics production while creating additional revenue for the related industries generating them, with added advantages of water recycling, decreased soil degradation, groundwater pollution and methane emissions. The selected ELLIPSE feedstocks are locally available and renewable leading to close to 100% renewably sourced personal care packaging and agricultural products.

ELLIPSE project will be able to cope with at least 100 tonnes of slaughterhouse waste and 20 tons of wastewater sludge derived from pulp and paper industry. The ELLIPSE technology will impact in the European bioeconomy by valorizing 20,000 tons of rumen content waste and 50,000 tons of paper sludge per year.

ELLIPSE consortium includes 13 partners, all of them relevant actors in the bio-based system from the waste stream production and management (Green Generation and Heinzelpaper) to technology developers (AIMPLAS, Università di Verona, CARTIF, Bioenergy and Sustainable Technologies - BEST) and industrial actors, both SMEs (Biotrend, Bio-Mi, ZER0 Emissions Engineering, Helian Polymers) and bigger companies (Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant, Novamont). Furthermore ELLIPSE can count on the expertise of ENCO for the market development perspective and ZER0 Emissions Engineering for the analysis of the end-user and consumer’s perspective.