• 26
    Oct
    horizon 2020

    PRESS RELEASE: HOW WASTE IS TURNED INTO FOOD

    Urban waste to become food on the dinner table. Unibio partners up with European companies and municipalities to create biobased products out of urban waste streams. The project is financially supported by the EU under Horizon 2020

     Unibio and various European-based partners, among these the Municipality of Kalundborg, are about to take a giant leap forward in demonstrating how waste materials can be converted into high-value products. The aim is to lay the foundation for a circular economy model that has the potential to be copied by many European municipalities in the years to come.

    On average, each European citizen produces approximately 200 kg of municipal biowaste per year, representing between 118 and 138 million tonnes of biowaste annually. Many European municipal biowaste management systems currently existing represent one-way flow systems in which materials and resources are underused, limiting their potential recovery into high-value products. The VALUEWASTE project proposes an integrated approach to urban biowaste upcycling for the production of high-value biobased products, developing the first complete solution to fully valorize biowaste that can be replicated across Europe.

    The consortium will implement three new value chains that will use urban biowaste as raw material for its valorization into high-value end-products in a cascading process, generating economic, social and environmental benefits: food & feed proteins, other food & feed ingredients and biobased fertilizer.

    The project will be developed at two very different European locations, Murcia in Spain and Kalundborg in Denmark, with the purpose of finding a solution both technically and socially adapted to the different socioeconomic contexts existing across Europe. Social initiatives will be created to raise consumer awareness and acceptance of urban biowaste-derived products. End-user product applications and new market opportunities will be demonstrated.

    Outcomes of the project will contribute to new standardization and will be useful information for EU policymakers in terms of waste management and in the adoption of new policies.

    Unibio CCO Michael Jensen states:

    Doing more with less is the way of the future. This project helps satisfying the needs of future generations as we are forced to rethink how feed, food and energy are produced if we are to live on a 10-billion-people planet by 2030. Taking proactive part in solving these issues is important to the Unibio team and already constitutes an important part of our mission statement.”

    About VALUEWASTE

    • Project title: Unlocking new VALUE from urban bioWASTE
    • Call: H2020-SFS-2018-1 – Innovation action
    • Project Coordinator: The project is coordinated by CETENMA – Centro Tecnológico de la Energía y el Medio Ambiente, Spain (ES)
    • Facilitator: The Danish value chain was facilitated by INBIOM (The Danish Innovation Network for Biomass)
    • 17 partners
    • Duration: 4 years
    • Budget: over EUR 10m, of which Unibio’s share amounts to EUR 3.2m

    About Unibio:

    • Uniprotein® is produced based among other things on methane as feedstock in Unibio’s U-Loop® fermentor
    • Unibio runs its research and pilot facilities at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and its demonstration-scale plant in Kalundborg, Denmark
    • The technology has been developed in close cooperation with DTU
    • The production plant in Kalundborg is co-financed by Innovation Fund Denmark, which sees great potential in industrial protein production
    • The first full-scale production plant has been built in Russia by a licensee
    • Uniprotein® is organic
    • Uniprotein® has a protein content of 70% and is produced without the use of pesticides. The production of Uniprotein® utilizes significantly less water than the production of plant-based protein sources and does not take up farmland
    • Uniprotein® has been approved in the EU for use in all animal and fish feed
    • The production process always results in a uniform product, and the only waste product is clean water and limited CO2

     

    How the Unibio technology fits into the circular economy. By 2050 at the latest Denmark will only have renewable gas in the grid.

    For further information, please contact:

    CCO Michael Jensen

    +45 6310 4040

    E-mail: mj@unibiogroup.com

U-Loop Technology

Watch our video that explains how U-Loop technology is used to produce Uniprotein

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