Bioplastic production from agro-industry residues

Purpose and goal

The project was successful and has moved us closer to the market. This is mainly thanks to the project plan which “forced” us to work close to our customers, which in turn meant that we could improve our business model and understand the value of our technology. However, we did not manage to produce the amount of material we intended to. Bearing in mind the updated business model, this is not a big issue as we won’t deliver the full process ourselves. Instead, we will work with upstream producers and the downstream part of the process was carried out during the project period.

Expected results and effects

The result from the project is that Bioextrax has manifested that we have a commercially viable downstream technology for producing PHA. We have been able to validate our value proposition and have carried out kilogram scale tests. The effect is that we are now able to move to large-scale tests in an industrial environment. In other words, the project has built the basis to reach the next step, which is to reach TRL 7.

Planned approach and implementation

The project entailed upstream and downstream pilotscale production of PHA, as well as business case development. Through market dialogue, we realized that our upstream capabilities are less relevant, and that we hence should approach the market as a downstream technology. The upstream pilotscale production was thus made partly redundant. Looking back, we should have allowed more flexibility into the planning, so that the technical activities would have been informed by the more market-focused ones, and vice-versa.