Renewable Materials and Food: Innovations and Applications

Bio-based materials are desperately needed to replace fossil-based materials in the world’s transition to a sustainable packaging industry. The focus of this presentation will be on the polyester PEF (polyethylene furanoate). PEF is a plant-based, highly recyclable plastic, with superior performance properties, good mechanical performance and a greener production process compared to today’s widely used petroleum-based packaging materials.

The presentation will give the audience a better understanding of the polyester PEF, its value proposition in applications and the fit of PEF in the circular economy to reduce, recycle and regenerate.

Environmental research and consultancy organization CE Delft conducted a prospective Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) study of cultivated meat (CM, also sometimes referred to as cell-based meat, clean meat, cultured meat and in-vitro meat) to provide insight into the environmental impact of this product when produced at commercial scales in 2030. In it, CM is compared to conventional meats (beef, pork, chicken) and plant-based alternatives. This is the first LCA study which uses primary data from multiple CM companies and from associated companies in the CM supply chain, cross-checked by independent experts.

It can be concluded that CM can offer environmental gains compared to conventional meats, but has on average higher impacts than fully plant-based options. CM uses much less land compared to all conventional meats (due to more efficient conversion of feed into meat) and has less nitrogen emissions, both of which lead to reduced biodiversity impacts. It does have higher energy use than conventional meat production. Nonetheless, it has a much lower carbon footprint than beef and is comparable to current global average footprints for pork and chicken when produced using conventional energy. When using sustainable energy, CM has a lower carbon footprint than ambitious production benchmarks for all conventional meats.

carbonauten is the minus CO2 factory and has developed a unique system for industry that reduces CO2 emissions and costs. This makes materials and food cheap.

The carbonauten system involves the production of a category of materials that is innovative in many respects: carbonauten NET-Materials® (Negative Emission Technology). They consist of a combination of biocarbons with various binders. As fillers and functional materials, their properties are improved compared to conventional materials.

The biocarbons are produced from biogenic and industrial residues by pyrolytic carbonization. Each ton of biocarbon stores up to 3.3 tons of CO2.

Other products include base-load renewable energy (heat, electricity, hydrogen) for further processing or processes in the industry, and high-quality distillates from pyrolysis oils as a platform for environmentally friendly biochemical products.

The material and energetic cascade use of biomass residues enables the production of large quantities, high qualities and low prices. This lowers economic hurdles and enables rapid transformation for the construction industry, builders, developers, and cities and communities.

Scaling is ensured through global, decentralized and technologically identical locations.
carbonauten will replace large quantities of fossil-based building materials, plastics, chemicals and fuels with at least 100 sites worldwide by 2030.

In a world where CO2 emissions are ever increasing and creating havoc, it is imperative that individuals and companies alike adopt solutions that are kinder to our environment. For heavy emission industries, like construction and chemicals, carbon capture and storage is an option to offset emissions, but these technologies are typically expensive, do not generate value and cannot be implemented everywhere. Carbon capture and utilization, however, is significantly more attractive, especially when transforming CO2 adds value to existing industry. Econic’s ready-now technology enables polyol producers to do just this.
Econic’s innovative catalyst technology allows captured waste CO2 to be used as a raw material in polyols, replacing up to 50% of traditional oil-based feedstocks, in a low-energy, low-cost process. These CO2 containing polyols can be used in a range of everyday products, like mattresses, building and refrigerator insulation, cleaning products, sportswear and in cars.
Also possible, and specific here, is the introduction of waste CO2 into polyurethane products and surfactants, with Econic’s technology offering three pillars of added value to the product and the industry:
1. Economic: CO2 is an order of magnitude cheaper, and less volatile in price, than traditional oil-based feedstocks. Furthermore, Econic’s technology operates at low pressures and temperatures, so can be retrofitted onto existing manufacture assets, and means it has low-cost entry to market.
2. Environmental: As demonstrated in our recent LCA, for every tonne of CO2 that is used as a raw material in manufacture, a further three tonnes minimum of CO2 emissions are avoided. In the polyurethane and surfactants industries, this would be the equivalent of planting 19 million trees every year.
3. Performance: The unique tunability of CO2 content in polyols offers the ability for polyurethane and surfactants producers and end users to select the properties of the polyol to match the specific downstream applications.
In contrast to many ‘green’ chemical technologies, Econic’s technology combines improved economic, technical, and environmental performance in one sustainable package.

Lignocellulosic biomass has been considered as abundantly available biobased feedstock to drive transformation of the industry towards more sustainable raw materials use. Despite focused efforts to scale novel conversion processes, then success has been limited. Fibenol is to bring the change, as unique pre-treatment technology was chosen to fractionate woody biomass at industrial scale, which allows extraction of high quality cellulosic sugars, near native lignin and specialty cellulose – sustainable raw materials to replace fossil based chemicals like bitumen, phenol, polyols, to use it as filler or functional additive in (bio-)plastics, use sugars as non- food competing raw material for fermentation processes etc. Fibenol is real, not anymore a dream and we have our sustainable raw material samples already available at ton scale to be tested out in diverse list of end use applications to set the scene for industrial production and supply within first half of 2023.

Fiberight has developed an innovative resource recovery platform which captures recyclable materials from household and commercial waste. These waste materials are then upgraded into market-ready products to be used in the manufacture of new goods. The process is robust and works with mixed, contaminated waste inputs which are typically burnt or buried (landfill and incineration). The process can recover and recycle over 70% of the materials in residual waste, helping to increase recycling rates and reduce the associated environmental impact of waste disposal.

Fiberight is using demand-led innovation to develop and deploy high-value products from resources in waste. The output products include: paper and card pulp for pulp moulding applications; second generation sugars for biochemicals and biomaterials, purified plastic polymers for mechanical recycling and other traditional recyclable commodities.

This talk has been prepared in collaboration with Marie-Pierre Ellies-Oury and Dr Sghaier Chriki.

The major challenges facing our evolving agri-food system nowadays are to provide enough food to the growing human population while protecting the planet, farm animals and consumer health. To meet these challenges, more and more FoodTech companies are proposing a disruptive technique based on laboratory food production: muscle cell culture to produce “meat”.
However, “cultured meat” is the subject of various controversies, including three major ones.
The first one concerns the ethical aspects not only about the potential to improve animal welfare, but also regarding the ethical values of our society with questions about food artificialisation, in a context where the demand for naturalness is high.
The second controversy concerns the environmental, health and nutritional aspects, i.e. the properties of "cultured meat" with an associated question: is it really meat?
The third controversy concerns its economic model, and above all how to produce it on a large scale? and at which cost? with which quality?
These three controversies interact with each other around technical, political, legal and societal issues. They concern the different visions of the World that citizens and stakeholders may have, including the total abolition of livestock farming for ideological reasons, or simply the reduction of intensive livestock farming, which is strongly criticised. Being in competition with other sustainable solutions for the future (reduction of food waste and loses, new habits of food consumption, development of agro-ecology, etc.) or simply with other meat substitutes (proteins from algae, plants, mycoproteins, insects), the future of "cultured meat" is questioned.

Jiva Materials Ltd is a UK-based company that has developed and patented a fully recyclable printed circuit board (PCB) laminate - Soluboard.
Soluboard is constructed using natural fibres which have a much lower carbon footprint than the market incumbent glass fibres.
Soluboard also delaminates in hot water where precious metals from the electronic components are recycled and the organic fibres are repurposed.
This novel recycling process avoids the energy intensive incineration typically used for standard PCBs.
Soluboard is being trialled with multiple international customers interested in reducing the carbon footprint of their electronics portfolios.
Jiva is directly tackling the impact of electronic waste, the fastest growing waste stream in the world.