From value chain to value loop with… – Information Centre – Research & Innovation

The EU-funded round financial state project MUBIC concentrated on the transformation of very low-value agricultural waste into high-value products – a single of which is made use of to grow mushrooms, whose cultivation the associates established out to revolutionise.

Additional particularly, this product or service is a new form of mushroom substrate, the product on which the mushrooms are developed. ‘Along with other outputs, these types of as gasoline pellets, fertiliser, and pre-dealt with feedstock for more quickly biogas output, the approach shaped in MUBIC also delivers significant sustainability gains,’ claims project coordinator Peter Damgaard Nielsen of Danish SME Sophisticated Substrate Systems (AST).

It notably raises the biogas generate from agricultural wastes like straw or horse bedding by about thirty %, through the prior reducing and grinding of this biomass. The skill to approach damp straw, meadow grass and similar product is a unique in addition point: the MUBIC approach for these difficult kinds of feedstock also consists of pretreatment with nitrogen to split down the lignin in the stalks, Nielsen clarifies.

Profitable, round, green

‘Using this approach, you get far more biogas and you get it more quickly, due to the fact the germs in the biogas plant can also use the lignin as feed,’ claims Nielsen. The nitrogen made use of for this pre-cure is recovered from the biogas plant, through the cure of the digestate – the residues of the feedstock.

The nitrogen is extracted from the digestate in services made as annexes to the biogas crops themselves. As of July 2020, operations have begun at the very first these types of insert-on plant made as a professional facility, in accordance to Nielsen.

In the MUBIC design, the digestate may, in point, have started off out as biomass supplied by the associates. ‘Our lorries choose feedstock to the biogas plant and digestate back to the insert-on plant, exactly where we dry it,’ Nielsen continues.

The dealt with digestate is then converted into a assortment of solutions. Along with the mushroom substrate, these outputs consist of gasoline pellets that are substantially far more sustainable than competing solutions due to the fact they are derived from a form of waste and due to the fact this waste is a residue of regionally sourced biomass.

The MUBIC approach delivers a pelletised substrate whose dry make a difference content, at 85 %, is a lot greater than that of conventional substrates, which usually normal about 30 %. Consequently, MUBIC substrate supplies significantly far more mushroom feed for every cubic metre than competing solutions, Nielsen clarifies. Thanks to its high dry-make a difference content, it can be stored and does not require cooling in the course of transport around for a longer period distances – not like conventional substrates, which may get started to rot.

MUBIC’s substrate complements a further innovation produced in the project: a program by which mushrooms developed on trays go past pickers on a conveyor belt, as opposed to pickers possessing to go through the cabinets in mushroom farms. This unique innovation was perfected by Dutch SME Panbo Devices, the next associate associated in the project, as a way to lessen harvesting prices.

Rooted in damp straw

MUBIC, which ended in January 2020, was funded by way of a Horizon 2020 programme particularly made to enable SMEs prepare their improvements for commercialisation. With no this assist, the straw-to-substrate concept would have been shelved, claims Nielsen, who emphasises that the funding enabled the associates to bring their concept to lifestyle.

AST experienced in the beginning thought of providing total insert-on crops, but finally made the decision to target on the solutions generated throughout the approach rather: cash flow is generated at quite a few ways, from uncooked product that is mostly offered for no cost.

Spent substrate from mushroom output is a single these types of residue, and a best example of the proposed round tactic. In MUBIC, it is recovered as feedstock for the output of biogas, and the digestate still left around from this approach is made use of to make fresh new substrate.

Both the new mushroom cultivation program and the several solutions from MUBIC’s round value chain have been achieved with interest, with new partnerships enabling the project associates to choose these developments forward, Nielsen concludes.