From value chain to value loop with… – Information Centre – Research & Innovation

The EU-funded round economic system job MUBIC targeted on the transformation of low-value agricultural squander into high-value products – one of which is used to expand mushrooms, whose cultivation the associates established out to revolutionise.

Extra particularly, this solution is a new style of mushroom substrate, the material on which the mushrooms are developed. ‘Along with other outputs, these types of as fuel pellets, fertiliser, and pre-taken care of feedstock for a lot quicker biogas output, the method formed in MUBIC also provides substantial sustainability gains,’ suggests job coordinator Peter Damgaard Nielsen of Danish SME State-of-the-art Substrate Systems (AST).

It notably improves the biogas produce from agricultural wastes like straw or horse bedding by about 30 %, via the prior reducing and grinding of this biomass. The means to method moist straw, meadow grass and equivalent material is a certain furthermore place: the MUBIC method for these challenging types of feedstock also entails pretreatment with nitrogen to crack down the lignin in the stalks, Nielsen describes.

Financially rewarding, round, green

‘Using this method, you get much more biogas and you get it a lot quicker, simply because the micro organism in the biogas plant can also use the lignin as feed,’ suggests Nielsen. The nitrogen used for this pre-treatment is recovered from the biogas plant, via the treatment of the digestate – the residues of the feedstock.

The nitrogen is extracted from the digestate in services developed as annexes to the biogas crops them selves. As of July 2020, operations have begun at the very first these types of insert-on plant developed as a commercial facility, in accordance to Nielsen.

In the MUBIC design, the digestate may, in simple fact, have began out as biomass provided by the associates. ‘Our lorries just take feedstock to the biogas plant and digestate again to the insert-on plant, in which we dry it,’ Nielsen carries on.

The taken care of digestate is then converted into a assortment of goods. Along with the mushroom substrate, these outputs incorporate fuel pellets that are substantially much more sustainable than competing goods simply because they are derived from a style of squander and simply because this squander is a residue of domestically sourced biomass.

The MUBIC method provides a pelletised substrate whose dry issue articles, at 85 %, is much larger than that of common substrates, which generally average about 30 %. Thus, MUBIC substrate presents considerably much more mushroom feed for each cubic metre than competing goods, Nielsen describes. Owing to its high dry-issue articles, it can be stored and does not need cooling in the course of transportation about lengthier distances – not like common substrates, which may begin to rot.

MUBIC’s substrate enhances an additional innovation designed in the job: a procedure by which mushrooms developed on trays move earlier pickers on a conveyor belt, as opposed to pickers acquiring to move via the shelves in mushroom farms. This certain innovation was perfected by Dutch SME Panbo Programs, the next companion concerned in the job, as a way to decrease harvesting costs.

Rooted in moist straw

MUBIC, which ended in January 2020, was funded by way of a Horizon 2020 programme particularly developed to assist SMEs put together their innovations for commercialisation. Devoid of this guidance, the straw-to-substrate notion would have been shelved, suggests Nielsen, who emphasises that the funding enabled the associates to provide their plan to everyday living.

AST had originally deemed selling overall insert-on crops, but ultimately made the decision to concentration on the goods generated during the method as an alternative: cash flow is generated at various measures, from uncooked material that is mostly out there for totally free.

Expended substrate from mushroom output is one these types of residue, and a best instance of the proposed round solution. In MUBIC, it is recovered as feedstock for the output of biogas, and the digestate still left about from this method is used to make contemporary substrate.

Each the new mushroom cultivation procedure and the different goods from MUBIC’s round value chain have been fulfilled with fascination, with new partnerships enabling the job associates to just take these developments ahead, Nielsen concludes.