In Europe, 239 million tons of organic wastes are produced per year by restaurants, hotels, markets, fisheries and other small to medium-size agri-food industries. The specific management of such wastes involves costly treatments and potential hygiene issues on-site. ORION aims at allowing most of these SMEs to manage their organic waste in situ in order to decrease the treatment costs and increase onsite hygiene conditions. Wastes will be valorized to produce bio-energy and a residue usable as a fertilizer. ORION relies on an interdisciplinary group of research centers in order to achieve the technical goals of the project, in particular the preparation and optimization of wastes to be treated as substrate for biomethanization, choice of appropriate captors and sensors for the bioprocess monitoring (digestate and gas), design of digester systems, digestion assays in bench-scale and pilot scale digesters, use of biogas energy, post-treatment and possible applications of the residues, e.g. as soil fertilizers.

Proceedings of the 21st European Biomass Conference and Exhibition, 3-7 June 2013, Copenhagen, Denmark, pp. 1271-1274