INGREEN

The overall objective is to demonstrate the value of innovative biotechnologies of the INGREEN project in capturing these under-exploited sidestreams. In addition to this, it will provide a number of societal and environmental objectives. It will:

• Cause a substantial shift in societal attitudes to bio-based products.
• Improve access to health-promoting foods across all levels society, improving wellbeing as a whole by providing the ingredients to develop functional foods.
• Help develop foods with longer shelf-life, reducing the issue of food waste.
• Contribute to tackling the micronutrient malnutrition that affects one third of the world’s population via improved mineral availability through foods.
• Develop animal feeds that will be enriched with probiotics, which will benefit the health of livestock and reduce the farming industry’s reliance on prophylactic antibiotic use.
• Introduce products and production processes capable of valorising three currently-underused types of biowaste, while the bioprocesses for the products being developed will have a lower environmental impact than existing methods.
• Develop more environmentally-friendly downstream processes for papermill sidestreams, currently one of the most polluting sectors in the world.
• Contribute to reducing the carbon footprint of production by at least 10 percent over the conventional fossil-based chemical approach.

The overall impact of INGREEN will be in delivering a major economic breakthrough in developing new added-value bio-based ingredients from theses sidestreams. In addition, it will:

• Provide an economic impact for growth and savings for the bio-based industries as new opportunities open up and the cost of waste disposal falls.
• Increase value yield from the chosen feedstock by at least 20 percent. It will do this by recovering valuable compounds from agri-food waste as well as paper mill wastewater and by-products that are currently not captured.
• Produce sustainable biotechnologies, tested in industrial environments, for extracting bio-based bioactive ingredients and compounds from whey and paper mill side streams and by-products. Overall, the output of safe/extracted/purified bio-based and functional compounds will encourage a range of cross-sectoral interconnections in the main bio-based economy clusters.
• Create a number of new bio-based value chains. Paper mill side streams will be valorised into prebiotic PHA-enriched cells for formulate nutritious feeds; organic matter from whey will be valorised in a number of ways, including for microbial food adjuncts and bio-based cosmetic cleansers and wheat milling by-products will be used in innovative bakery applications and nutraceuticals.
• Develop at least five new consumer products. Lactobionic acid for use in food, cosmetic, medicine and pharmaceutical industries; galactooligosaccharides as a bio-based food ingredient; yarrowia lipolytica, which has a range of applications from cosmetics to food and feed; polyhydroxyalkanoates as food additive for animal feed and a range of pre-fermented ingredients for use in bakery products.