WaysTUP! aims to demonstrate the establishment of new value chains for urban biowaste utilisation to produce higher value purpose products (i.e. biobased products, including food and feed ingredients), through a multi-stakeholder approach in line with circular economy. The project will showcase a portfolio of new ‘urban biowaste to biobased products' processes starting from different feedstocks i.e. fish and meat waste, spent coffee grounds, household source separated biowaste, used cooking oils, cellulosic waste derived from municipal wastewater and waste treatment plants and sewage sludge. Pilot demonstration will take place in several European cities i.e. Valencia (Spain), London (UK), Alicante (Spain), Prague (Czech Republic), Athens (Greece), L'Alcúdia (Spain), Terni (Italy) and Crete (Greece). The processes will result in the production of food and feed additives, flavours, insect protein, coffee oil, bioethanol, biosolvents, polyxydroxyalkanoates, ethyl lactate, long chain dicarboxylic acid, bioplastics and biochar. End-product characterisation and safety assessment will be implemented. Life Cycle Assessment of the value chains will be conducted to assess their environmental impact. WaysTUP! will develop and implement a behavioural change approach with citizens and local communities by improving the current perception of citizens and local communities on urban biowaste as a local resource; enhancing the active participation of citizens in the separate collection of urban biowaste; and improving customer acceptance of urban bio-waste derived products. New profitable business models will be developed preparing market entry of the technology solutions demonstrated as well as of the end-products resulting from them. Finally, the project will provide guidance for city managers on adopting new organisational models supporting the valorisation of urban biowaste, as well as evidence-based EU level policy recommendations for decision makers.

RefuCoat project aims to develop hybrid bio-based high oxygen/water barrier and active coatings to be used in a monolayer bio-based food packages (films and trays) as alternative to current metallised and modified atmosphere (MAP) packages to avoid the use of non-renewable materials in multilayer structures that currently lead to complex and expensive recycling steps. Hybrid coating formulations will combine cost-efficiently produced polyglycolic acid (PGA) and modified silica oxide. Fully biodegradable packages for fresh food products will be obtained with middle chain modified PHAs. PGA and PHA based hybrid coatings with high gas barrier properties will be further improved with active substances for improved shelf-life. Furthermore, new packages based on bio-PET and bio-PE combined with hybrid and active coatings will be developed. The generated products will be validated and compared to current metallised, non bio-based alternatives in industrial products, in performance, shelf-life and biodegradability. Safety and regulatory compliance, environmental and economic sustainability will be specifically addressed. RefuCoat consortium is formed by 12 synergistic partners, 7 of them BIC members, reunites all actors in the value chain, SME partners (MIPLAST and IRIS), industrial partners (UNILEVER, MANOR, DACSA and BIOPOLIS), and RTO Partners (THUNEN, CIB, AIMPLAS, EUFIC, Fraunhofer and AINIA). The project maximizes exploitation within the Consortium, promoting a circular economy concept, but also considers dissemination and communication in order to maximize the value of the project outcomes. maximizesexploitation within the consortium, promoting a circular economy concept, but also considers dissemination andcommunication in order to maximize the value of the project outcomes. Refucoat main impacts are expected in the improved performance of food packages, reduction of landfilling waste, cost-and environmental effectiveness in processing by Life Cycle and Techno-Economic Assessment, improved preservation of food products, new markets and contribution to KPI of BBI-JI. RefuCoat aims at a significant contribution in more than 880 jobs.

This Project pursues the implementation a standardized pipeline for surrogate production of plant flavonoids in synthetic microbial consortia (SMCs) by means of standardization and systems-guided assembly of highly complex biological devices. Flavonoids are the more abundant and consumed group of phytonutrients, used in numerous applications including functional food & beverages, dietary supplements, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals. Despite its growing demand, flavonoids production remains elusive to chemical synthesis and biotech-based approaches, thus current flavonoid market is constrained to the scarce plant-based sources. These compounds are synthetized in nature through complex pathways involving an intense chemicals trafficking through plant compartments. By facilitating component troubleshooting and re-usability—instead of optimizing a single whole-cell biocatalyst— SynBio4Flav will recreate such non-homogeneous scenario by breaking-down specific portions of the complexes and highly regulated biochemical routes between different microbial species, each of them genetically programmed to deliver an optimal output of the corresponding biosynthetic step(s) i.e. through a distributed catalysis engineered in a defined SMC. Enabling such novel approach, SynBio4Flav will push the existing boundaries of the synthetic biology by acting along the whole Synthetic Biology hierarchy abstraction, and remarkably, in those with high complexity level e.g. cell systems and microbial communities. By creating libraries of optimized cell systems programmed to deliver an optimal output, and novel synthetic biology tools for cell systems assembling into 3D SMCs, SysBio4Flav will reach a TRL5 in production of natural and new-to-nature glycosylated flavonoids. The durable output of SynBio4Flav will be a standardized platform containing hundreds of optimal cell systems for exploring the full combinatorial space of flavonoids biosynthesis, including thousands of new-to-nature analogues.