Efficient municipal wastewater treatment, such as the systems currently in place in most European municipalities, produces vast amounts of sewage sludge. The latest data collected show a yearly production of 9.637 thousands of tons in the EU28 countries. Sludge treatment issues are often neglected in comparison with water-related parameters which results in serious technical difficulties and highly expensive disposal methods. As a result, an energy efficient, environmentally sound and economically viable process for sludge disposal hardly exists. The most common disposal methods for sludge are spreading on agricultural soil, composting and incineration. Landfilling has been long banned, the use as fertilizer, although very moderate in costs, is being banned in many regions due to concerns about contamination of soils with heavy metals and endocrine disruptive compounds. Composting raises the same concerns, and it is a labor-intensive and unsafe process, which leaves incineration as the most used option, albeit an expensive and not effective one. Incineration entails the highest costs (80-110 € /ton), but is also considered the safest disposal method and is fast growing and widely adopted. It presents also technical difficulties, such as the low overall efficiency of the process, the huge logistic efforts required to transport the sludge to the incineration plants, or the disposal of the ashes after the sludge has been incinerated. In this situation, the proposing company, Ingelia, has the objective to demonstrate and commercialize their proprietary technology for hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) to the conditions of sewage sludge, showing clearly technical and economic advantages compared to incineration. Ingelia aims to increase the amount of sludge converted into high value products such as fuel or activated carbons for water treatment. The HTSew process turns the sewage sludge disposal from a costly process into an income-generating activity.

The objective of BioRen is to develop techno-economical competitive drop-in biofuels for road transport from the organic fraction of municipal solid waste (OFMSW). A higher value fuel is targeted: glycerol tertiary butyl ether (GTBE) is a promising fuel additive to both diesel and gasoline that improves engine performance and cuts harmful exhaust emissions (i.e. fine dust). It can be blended in higher amounts than e.g. ethanol, without having to change the engine. Bio-ethanol and bio-isobutanol from OFMSW are required intermediaries in this innovation path towards GTBE. Their specific business case as second generation drop-in fuel will be compared to the bio-GTBE business case, to select the most sustainable option for building a demo plant. The project will develop a pretreatment method, industrial 2G Saccharomyces strains that produce ethanol and isobutanol respectively and chemical dehydration to convert isobutanol into isobutene. The isobutene is converted into GTBE by adding Category 1 glycerol, another problematic waste stream. The resulting fuels (ethanol, isobutanol and GTBE) will be tested in engine tests to provide feedback regarding their performance, emission results and fuel use. This ambitious project is continuously monitored by LCA, techno-economic, market and regulatory and IP analysis in order to come up with a realistic business plan. The developed processes will be integrated in a revolutionary MSW treatment plant that combines the most efficient technologies of material reuse, and is currently looking into optimising the profitability of its organic waste fraction. The project consortium has all the required players to succeed: 3 RTO’s address the research challenges, 7 SMEs either bring in their technological developments or are a scale-up partner that bring the processes to min. TRL5. The project is led by a financial consultancy that invests in the MSW demonstration treatment plant.

HarWASTing aims to develop innovative business models based on circular economy (CE) principles to promote bioeconomy in rural areas, by implementing a set of scalable and replicable technological solutions to efficiently exploit underutilised biomass from forestry and agriculture to develop innovative and high-value products. These models will support sustainable management practices and will promote an efficient use of natural resources, reducing overall waste generation and post-harvest losses by implementing valorisation processes and fostering CE principles. To this end, a methodology will be implemented to collect, treat and revalorize biomass from forest and agricultural harvest, pruning waste and bioethanol process side-streams, respecting the cascade principle for biomass use. A one-fits-all technology, Hydrothermal Carbonization, for a higher energy efficient treatment of lignocellulosic biomass residues will be combined with Pressurized Hot Water Extraction and innovative post-treatment technologies, to develop high-value added products and avoid any non-valorised side-stream. The whole concept will be demonstrated at small-scale pilot, built-upon existing wood, food and bioenergy value chains to further strengthen their economic and environmental sustainability through synergistic interlinkages between them. Mediterranean, Boreal and Continental bioregions will be studied. The holistic concept is based on the central valorisation route of Hydrothermal Carbonizationand its solid product, hydrochar, that is converted into hybrid wood-hydrochar panels with less than 10% of bio-adhesive for special applications such as fire protection or electromagnetic shielding. A novel support AI-based digital tool for forecasting agroforest feedstock availability will be developed. Innovative digital passports will help to commercialize the panels and bioadhesives. The hydrochar will be offered on a new digital platform which also serves for networking and for publishing of best-practices.