Novamont is among the partners of the EU project ELLIPSE

On 17th-18th May the ELLIPSE project Kick-off Meeting (KoM) was held at the headquarters of the project coordinator AIMPLAS, in Valencia Parc Technologic, with the participation of the project partners and the Project Officer. During the first day of KoM, after an initial project overview provided by the Project Coordinator, each partner presented its Work Packages (WPs) showing the activities to be performed during the project timeframe. In the second day ENCO as WP8 leader explained to the ELLIPSE consortium the importance of Communication, Dissemination and Exploitation activities for the project. Following this, the ELLIPSE partners were divided into two working groups to solve some doubts related to the ELLIPSE proposal. Finally, a visit to AIMPLAS facility concluded the second day of KoM. 

The ELLIPSE project is funded by the European Union under the Circular Bio-based Joint Undertaking (CBE JU) call HORIZON-JU-CBE-2022-IA-04. For its deployment it has been allocated 5,509,655.50€ over a 48-months period.

The ELLIPSE project will address the valorisation of two heterogeneous waste streams generated in significant amounts in Europe, slaughterhouse waste (bellygrass or rumen content) and paper and pulp sludge, to produce cost-efficient polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) for agricultural and personal care applications, by the coprocessing with other organic wastes (OW) such as sludge from the dairy industry and glycerol from the biodiesel industry, as well as recovering nutrients to produce bio-based fertilizers (BBFs). The integration of these waste streams as biorefinery feedstocks will allow reducing the volumes of landfilled waste, opening new avenues for platform chemicals and bioplastics production while creating additional revenue for the related industries generating them, with added advantages of water recycling, decreased soil degradation, groundwater pollution and methane emissions. The selected ELLIPSE feedstocks are locally available and renewable leading to close to 100% renewably sourced personal care packaging and agricultural products. ELLIPSE project will be able to cope with at least 100 tonnes of slaughterhouse waste and 20 tons of wastewater sludge derived from pulp and paper industry. The ELLIPSE technology will impact in the European bioeconomy by valorising 20,000 tons of rumen content waste and 50,000 tons of paper sludge per year.

ELLIPSE consortium includes all the relevant actors (13 partners) in the bio-based system from the waste stream production and management (GG and HEPA) to technology developers (AIMPLAS, UNIVR, CARTIF, BEST) and industrial actors, both SMEs (BIOT, BIOMI, ZER0-E, HP) and bigger companies (BBEPP, NOVAMONT), furthermore ELLIPSE can count on the expertise of ENCO for the market development perspective and ZER0-E for the analysis of the end-user and consumer’s perspective.