The population of cities continues to grow, creating new waste management issues. It is becoming increasingly challenging to find high-quality destinations for biomass waste streams such as food waste, wood waste and green waste.
With the Urban Biorefinery (URB) project, GLIMPS.bio wants to find an answer to the challenge of biomass waste in the city. We want to develop a concrete realisable business case around coffee grounds and bread leftovers: two urban, organic-biological waste streams that everyone is confronted with and that offer a lot of potential in terms of high-quality valorisation.
For both streams, we investigated which circular applications are technically and economically feasible and have sufficient potential to roll them out on a large scale. Working with various partners, we conducted lab tests, developed prototypes, sought additional funding and built a business case.
In the coffee grounds case, we focus on collecting, drying, and pressing coffee grounds into coffee oil.
In the case around bread scraps, we are working within an R&D project to develop bio pigments based on bread scraps, in order to develop a sustainable colour application for the textile industry.
Glimps
Partners Suez R&R Belgium, IVAGO
Sectors
Themes
Organisations
Together with our partners, we continue to work on the subproject on coffee grounds. Another pilot project will follow in which we aim for more R&D. In time, we want to collect, dry and press several tonnes of grit using a small-scale pilot installation.
For the bread waste route, we are looking for additional funding in 2022 to further scale up our first successful results from this project, in cooperation with Ghent start-up Narture. For this, we are looking at a VLAIO feasibility study or development project or seeking funding at European level.