Lactic acid and biosurfactants sourced from sustainable agricultural and industrial (food) WASTE feedstocks as novel FUNCtional ingredients for consumer products

WASTE2FUNC aims to build a platform to efficiently collect food waste from agriculture, food industry, supermarkets, auctions and restaurants. These food wastes are currently often discarded, left on the field or incinerated and thus show no value. They will become valuable raw materials to be converted into lactic acid and biosurfatants, high value ingredients for respectively bioplastics and biosurfactants, with applications in cosmetics, household – and personal care products. This conversion process uses industrial biotechnology based technologies developed by TripleW ad Amphistar. The project brings together 13 partners from 5 countries, including SMEs, large enterprises such as Evonik and Ecover, research institutes and agricultural associations. The ultimate goal at the end of the project is to understand the potential of establishing a biorefinery in which functional molecules can be made from all this collected food waste in a sustainable and economically profitable way. These functional molecules can subsequently be used as building blocks for bioplastics and as ingredients in cosmetics, in biological detergents and in numerous other applications. WASTE2FUNC will contribute to a more sustainable industry by using renewable resources and by its circular approach. This will decrease CO2 emissions by at least 20% compared to the current production processes of these molecules and increase value from waste 2-10 fold and create (high-tech) jobs for the primary and downstream sector in Belgium and Europe.

During the second reporting period of WASTE2FUNC:

The technologies developed prior to the project to produce lactic acid and biosurfactants from food waste were thoroughly optimised and additionally also demonstrated on DEMO scale in the two WASTE2FUNC DEMO plants.
The construction of the lactic acid DEMO production plant in Antwerp and the DEMO plant at BBEPP for lactic acid and biosurfactant production were ready to use.
In these DEMO plants, over 2 tonnes of lactic acid and 60 kg of biosurfactants was produced from food waste so far.
The collection system for the food waste was progressing well: a logistics application was already available in-house with one of the new WASTE2FUNC partners (added during an amendment) and the part for actual digital registration of (food) waste is being developed and added to this existing application. This is well on track and will be delivered by the end of the project.

Existing processes for microbial biosurfactant production on 1G substrates are adapted, optimised and scaled towards 2G food waste feedstocks for both lactic acid and biosurfactants
New-to-market BSs are produced on 2G substrates, before only on 1G substrates.
Building of DEMO process lines for DEMO scale production of 2G waste based LA at BIOG and BBEPP ready.
Development of WASTE2FUNC supply-chain is on track and optimised by ECOSON..