Material and energetic use of biomass

Foto: ATB

Successful project ending

The PERCAL project has made significant steps in the valorisation of municipal solid waste (MSW). The technologies developed in the project have the potential to convert 30 to 50 percent of the 300 million tonnes of MSW generated in Europe every year - providing a significant contribution to the transition to a circular bioeconomy.   

At the end of 2020, the project will end after three and a half years of intensive research collaboration.  It was extremely successful!

ATB’s contribution to PERCAL was to develop a process to produce lactic acid from the organic fraction of municipal solid waste. 

Lactic acid is a versatile chemical, which finds applications in many fields such as pharmacy, food and chemical industry. The process utilizes the highly specialized bacteria Bacillus coagulans for the fermentation of the organic fraction of MSW hydrolysates. The microorganism is able to homo-fermentatively transform sugars into lactic acid, in other words without the generation of by-products. As a result, yields for the conversion of sugars are above 80 %.

ATB will continue its research activities in the BBI project CAFIPLA looking at the transformation of side and residual streams from organic waste pre-treatment into the carboxylic acid, lactic acid.

In the last stage of the PERCAL project, partner IMECAL (Spain) has studied the adaptation of a versatile biotechnological plant to obtain the three intermediates targeted by the PERCAL project bioethanol, lactic acid and succinic acid, to evaluate the scaling of the monitoring system previously developed at lab scale and to carry out a simulation task of the unified plant using the organic fraction of municipal solid waste as feedstock. The work done serves as a basis for the development of a demo or industrial biorefinery for the production of different added value bio-based chemicals.

The project PERCAL (Chemical Building Blocks from Versatile MSW Biorefinery) has received funding from the Bio-Based Industries Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement Nº 745828.

The final project event took place virtually on 4 December 2020 and featured presentations from the project partners next to viewpoints from external stakeholders. The highly interesting discussion touched on several aspects of the problem of waste management in Europe and why technologies like those from PERCAL will be key in becoming more sustainable.

More information about the innovative pathways for converting MSW can be found in the guidance document Conversion Routes of the Organic Fraction of Municipal Solid Waste into High Added Value Products.
he document is available to download here.

Contact ATB:
Dr. José Pablo López-Gómez
Dr.-Ing. Joachim Venus

Cookies

We use cookies. Some are required to offer you the best possible content and functions while others help us to anonymously analyze access to our website. (Matomo) Privacy policy

Required required

Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the proper functioning of the website. This category only includes cookies that ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.

Cookie Duration Description
PHPSESSID Session Stores your current session with reference to PHP applications, ensuring that all features of the site can be displayed properly. The cookie is deleted when the browser is closed.
bakery 24 hours Stores your cookie preferences.
fe_typo_user Session Is used to identify a session ID when logging into the TYPO3 frontend.
__Secure-typo3nonce_xxx Session Security-related. For internal use by TYPO3.
Analytics

With cookies in this category, we learn from visitors' behavior on our website and can make relevant information even more accessible.

Cookie Duration Description
_pk_id.xxx 13 months Matomo - User ID (for anonymous statistical analysis of visitor traffic; determines which user is being tracked)
_pk_ses.xxx 30 minutes Matomo - Session ID (for anonymous statistical analysis of visitor traffic; determines which session is being tracked)