The use of spent organic materials has not yet reached an industrial level of market potential in terms of the value hierarchy in which its use for the production of pharma and cosmetics and food and feed are the preferred options, and where bioplastic and biopolymer production is a preferred alternative to the production of bulk chemicals, fuels, energy and heat, and, of course, landfill.
This is the case of Brewer’s spent grains (BSG), the most abundant by product of the brewing industry. They are not seasonal and are available at low or no cost and produced in large quantities all over Europe, and have limited use as a feedstock. Although about 70% of this by product is currently used for animal feed and 10% for bioethanol production, 20% of it currently goes to landfill. BSG is also a promising candidate as a PHA feedstock due to its composition and the damaged state of its chemical structure after malting, which makes it more prone to enzymatic hydrolysis processes leading to sugars for fermentation by the biotechnology industry.
Based on this concept, the BIOSUPPACK Project aims to deliver novel, cost-competitive and versatile bio-based packaging solutions based on PHA that demonstrate high-performance packaging of food, beverages, cosmetics and homecare products, as well as no environmental damage during and after use.
To comply with new legislation and consumer awareness, as well as industry requirements related to the need of biobased packaging to be balanced between cost and performance in order to compete with its non-biodegradable fossil-fuel-based counterparts, BIOSUPPACK is a European project coordinated by AIMPLAS and made up of a consortium of 17 partners from different European countries that have combined their expertise, know-how, technical capabilities and efforts to achieve a common objective. The project has received funding from the Bio-based Industries Joint Undertaking (JU) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 101023685.
The project will help create a new value chain by connecting the brewing industry with new biobased packaging solutions for the food and beverage, cosmetics and homecare industries. It will also connect the brewing industry with the biotechnology involved in the specific end of life foreseen for the packaging waste of the future, which will involve enzymatic recycling for the production of novel monomer units that will feed packaging material production in combination with BSG, thus closing the loop.
Considering this, the BIOSUPPACK Project involves technical, logistics, economic and social challenges that will be overcome and assessed during project development and implementation. Project success is necessary to make a real contribution to current regulations and policies related to the circular economy model, specifically those regarding plastics circularity and sustainable packaging.
The BIOSUPPACK Project is therefore expected to have great impact on EU bioplastics and end-user sectors, biorefineries, biotechnology industries and society.
At this stage of the project, the first batches of PHA material have been produced and formulated into compounds suitable for injection moulding and extrusion blow moulding technologies, thus allowing for production of the first set of rigid packaging prototypes at pilot scale, consisting of beer bottle displays and 125 mL bottles. The next steps involve the production of packaging prototypes at semi-industrial scale and validation. In parallel, several innovations have been assessed and are under optimization, such as the sorting efficiency of PHA-based waste, the use of novel enzymes for PHA degradation, and the use of plasma technology to improve the efficiency of BSG conversion and PHA waste degradation processes.