The ALGWAS-BIOR project will support emerging strategies suitable for the management of the growing amount of food wasted due to mass and highly processed food production. In response to the urgent needs for a sustainable regulation of the economic and environmental nuisances caused by the limits of the organic waste control mechanisms in the food industry, the ALGWAS-BIOR project tends to design an integrated cascade Biorefining concept. The waste-stream discarded by the algae industry following an agar extraction process of the Rhodophyta Gelidium sesquipedale will be used as example. The industrial phycocolloid-centric extraction of this seaweed engenders a large quantity of undesired materials still highly full of organic materials and biologically active compounds. These compounds are high value ingredients indispensable as food additives, pharmaceutical, and health-promoting bioproducts as well as precursors for renewable biomaterials and bioenergy.
The cascade technology considered in this project is a versatile solution adaptable to a wide range of food industry and waste-stream, thus, moving up the food value chain into a more sustainable techno-economical paradigm.
The objectives are to combine both basic and applied multidisciplinary research in the field, leading to an interdisciplinary model mostly build around supercritical and subcritical fluids technologies, coupled with existing modern clean technologies. Demonstrable results will be subjected to pilot-scale testing and process validation using the facilities of Hiperbaric as a partner.
State-of-the-art marketable processes are expected to be delivered to reinforce the sustainability of the food industry sector and in parallel to contribute as a solution to the acute environmental and economic issues concomitant to waste disposal throughout the EU-27 region. Apart from technical and scientific objectives, the ALGWAS-BIOR project is oriented towards an efficient dissemination, transfer of knowledge and training between academic, industries and society.
Extended impact:
The ALGWAS-BIOR Project will generate extended impacts on:
- The contribution to the installation of appropriate food industry waste management strategies through the recovery of value added marketable bioproducts.
- Promoting the development of an ecological industry with the reuse of the food industry waste-stream as resourceful raw material.
- The implementation of a viable techno-economical model of food processing design.
- The optimization of the advantage of prioritizing clean technologies particularly the supercritical and subcritical fluids technologies in the achievement of a performant waste-energy Nexus.
- The contribution to the creation of wider green market opportunities exportable and adaptable in typical regional and/or economic models.