Trash-to-sugar project wins EU grant

0
984

In Europe, a consortium of 11 companies has received funding to develop a process that converts household waste into biobased materials.

Dubbed VAMOS—or Value Added Materials from Organic Waste Sugars—the project will receive €7 million ($7.8 million) from the Bio Based Industries Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research program.

The project aims to extract sugars from paper and card-based materials found in municipal solid waste. The sugars will then be used to produce biobased products, reducing the need to use first-generation sugars from agricultural products like sugar beets.

The consortium includes companies from the United Kingdom, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Austria, and Denmark.

“Securing this important EU funding enables us to take our promising pilot-scale work over the last five years to the next stage and demonstrate its commercial viability as an economically and environmentally sustainable process,” Nick Thompson, Managing Director of Fiberight Limited, a member of the consortium, tells European Plastic Product Manufacturer.