Dubbed OLinWASTE, the team will evaluate the suitability of oil mill waste as feedstock for bioplastics, biofertilizers, biopesticides and bioenergy.
The project has received just under €4 million in funding from Horizon Europe and will run for four years.
UK partner Surrey University will develop a digital twin of a biorefinery’s waste treatment and energy flows to simulate operations and accelerate optimization. Europe’s olive mills produce ten million tons of waste each year, according to The Engineer.
The consortium includes Sapienza, Padua, Cranfield, Burgos, and Surrey universities, the Austrian Centre of Industrial Biotechnology, Research Institutes of Sweden, Rise Processum, industrial biorefinery Agrolio-Agroenergy, and the open innovation cluster CLIC Innovation Oy.