Valencia-based AIMPLAS, a Spanish plastics technology center, is developing a project to develop a packaging solution for polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) derived from beer production waste. The project, called BioSupPack, is also dedicated to demonstrating a new solution for a viable depolymerization recycling process.
Beer lees are a cheap carbon source for PHA production
The research group brought together 17 partners from eight countries and received 8.8 million euros (68.93 million RMB) in funding from the European Union's BioIndustry Joint Undertaking (BBI-JU) and the Horizon 2020 program.
PHAs are biosynthesized by bacteria fed with renewable carbon sources. They are fully biodegradable in soil or water, but one of the problems that has long prevented large-scale production of PHAs is the cost of carbon sources for microbial metabolism, which makes traditional methods of PHA production extremely expensive. Many PHA manufacturers rely on high-cost substrates such as pure sugars, fats and animal or plant proteins. As a result, the cost of the carbon source can account for up to 60% of the total cost of PHA production.
AIMPLAS wanted to develop a cost-effective solution by using brewer's lees (BSG) as a carbon source.
BSG makes up 85% of the brewing waste and costs about €0.85 per kilogram (equivalent to $6.66 RMB.) AIMPLAS will also obtain monomers from the enzymatic recycling of PHA packaging waste. From these PHA compounds, several prototype rigid packages will be designed at pilot scale with customized barrier properties, taking into account the most viable options for waste collection and separation.
Packaging solutions will include injection-molded PHA and biocomposites, as well as packaging made from PHA-coated fibers and ready-to-eat trays.
AIMPLAS and its partners will also develop an enzymatic recycling process to recover PHA from these new packaging solutions, aiming to demonstrate the feasibility of recycling post-industrial waste in the bioplastics production process. The prototypes will be evaluated in terms of environmental and socio-economic sustainability and safety
AIMPLAS has been authorized by DIN CERTCO and BPI to conduct biodegradability and compostability tests
In addition, AIMPLAS has been authorized by DIN CERTCO (Rhein Köln, Germany), an independent European certification company for the bioplastics market, to conduct biodegradability and compostability tests in its test labs, which will allow bioplastics companies to obtain the DIN eco-label for industrially compostable, DIN home compostable and DIN biodegradable soil.
AIMPLAS was also included in the list of accredited laboratories of the US agency BPI (New York, NY, USA), which helped the company to obtain BPI composting certification.
These authorizations, as well as those obtained from ENAC (Madrid, Spain) and TÜV Austria (Brunn am Gebirge, Austria) in 2017 and 2019, respectively, accredit the AIMPLAS laboratory's ability to perform tests under standard EN 13432.
