PROJECT DESCRIPTION
BACKGROUND
Municipal sewage typically contains many high value materials including cellulose, biopolymers, phosphorus and bioplastics; these are lost during processing at municipal waste water treatment plants (WWTPs). It is essential to ensure that these increasingly scarce resources do not go to waste by recovering and subsequently using them.
Many EU-funded projects have successfully proved the environmental benefits of using new technologies to recover these materials, but they have often encountered challenges in achieving economic viability. Challenges such as putting a financial value on the recovered resources, combined with legal and organisational obstacles, have hampered market development and further roll out. This in turn hinders the successful commercialisation of recovery technologies, restricts their wider potential and limits their overall contribution a circular economy.
As a result, the market penetration and integration of a newly developed biopolymer such as Kaumera biopolymers (a byproduct of the activated granular sludge wastewater treatment process) into new supply chains has proved highly challenging. Therefore, current production and replication of recovered Kaumera remains very small. The LIFE Waste2Kaumera project (2017-23) successfully recovered Kaumera . However, the project faced significant challenges when it came to making it economically viable. Only one contract was signed for using Kaumera as a biostimulant and no other sales were made.
OBJECTIVES
The overall objective of the LIFE Kaumera2Market project is to overcome barriers to Kaumera valorisation and other challenges whilst transferring best practices to other LIFE projects working in similar fields.
The project will do this by:
- developing an entirely new model for coordinating and maximising Kaumera production, marketing and sales
- getting legal and regulatory approval for different Kaumera applications
- stimulating the market for Kaumera
- promoting the international value of Kaumera
- developing a framework to deal with the legal and regulatory issues associated with valuing resources recovered from sewage at WWTPs
RESULTS
The project’s expected results are:
- a fully operational public-private start-up co-op comprising 6 water boards to coordinate, manage and optimise the production, marketing and sales of Kaumera in the Netherlands
- approval of CE marking for the use of Kaumera as a biostimulant
- minimum of 6 additional jobs created
- an investment plan for additional Kaumera production capacity in the Netherlands
- increased Kaumera production in the Netherlands
- an investment plan developed for a third Kaumera plant
- a positive business case developed to replicate the set-up of Kaumera production, marketing and sales in the Netherlands to other EU Member States
- a replicable framework for organisational, regulatory and business development to stimulate other projects focused on resource recovery at WWTPs
- production of 350 tonnes of dry Kaumera/year at Zutphen and 25 tonnes of dry Kaumera/year at Epe (equivalent to 5 000 tons of wet Kaumera/year) by 2026.
- 2 additional sales routes for Kaumera in the agriculture, horticulture, forestry and construction sectors
In addition, the expected results 5 years after the end of the LIFE Kaumera2Market project (i.e.i.e., by 2031):
- total production of 10 000 tonnes/year dry Kaumera
- 30-35% less sludge produced (reduction of 62 400 tonnes)
- energy savings of 220.8 terajoules
- greenhouse gas (GHG) emission savings of 13 680 tonnes/CO2 equvalent
- 10 000 tonnes/year of Kaumera used to replace existing fossil-based materials in EU Member States
- increased sales of Nereda biological waste water treatment plants and Kaumera extraction installations (KEIs) across the EU
- between 5 and 25 other EU-funded projects (including LIFE projects) focusing on wastewater resource recovery adopt the replicable models and approaches demonstrated by LIFE Kaumera2Market
