From waste to feed proteins by hybrid living materials

Climate change, plastic pollution, and food insecurity are existential threats and pose tremendous challenges to Europe and the world. The M-era.Net / Free State of Saxony granted REPLACER project “Recycling plastic and developing hybrid living materials by capturing greenhouse gases to produce value-added products“ focuses on addressing these challenges by combining the advantages of the living and non-living worlds to develop hybrid living materials (HLMs) and enabling the sustainable production of feed proteins. The Research and Transfer Center for bioactive matter (b-ACTmatter), Leipzig University, coordinates the REPLACER project.

Circular economy. Picture: b-ACT/BBZ Management board

According to Dr. Rohan Karande, scientific and technological innovations aiming to reduce greenhouse gases and plastic waste while presenting a sustainable solution to the current feed production system are urgently needed to overcome climate change, plastic pollution, and food insecurity issues. To tackle these challenges, the REPLACER project will dedicate efforts to designing and scaling HLM-based bioreactor prototypes to produce microbial biomass as a value-added feed product from CO2 and CH4. We hope to test the pilot scale prototype in 3 – 4 years.

REPLACER is one of the 9 successfully evaluated projects out of 82 submitted proposals to the M-ERA.NET 2022 call topic “Functional materials”. The project developments will contribute to the EU Commission’s European Green Deal and Circular Economy Action Plan goals of developing advanced, resource-efficient technologies supporting a circular economy. In addition, REPLACER targets to mitigate GHGs, reduce plastic pollution, and produce value-added feed products, thus supporting several of the relevant UN sustainable development goals (SDGs).

At Leipzig University, the consortium is led by the b-ACTmatter -team; Dr.-Ing. Rohan Karande (coordinator), Prof. Frank Cichos, Dr. Susanne Ebitsch, Prof. Oskar Hallatschek, and Prof. Tilo Pompe. Within the Leipzig region of Saxony, the project establishes a close connection between research at Leipzig University, the Leibniz Institute of Surface Engineering (IOM), and the material technology company “qCOAT”. On the European level, the consortium involves partners from the University of Latvia, Latvia, and Holisun SRL, Romania.

Comments are closed.