The INGREEN project made substantial progress, in the 42 months, towards meeting the project main objectives. The results have led to several industrially relevant prototypes, which have been further demonstrated and optimized in the final year of the project. Furthermore, each of the industrial partners have been highly involved in evaluating the developed processes and biomass and functional ingredients. All of the prototype formulations have been assessed for commercial feasibility continuously during the development process.
Even with several restrictions due to COVID-19 having led to significant delays, the project met all of the objectives on time and within budget. WP2 studied benchmarking of technology components that are suitable for development from lab/small pilot scale through to larger/demonstrator scale operational in an industrially relevant environment, WP2 is now complete. WP3 showed the progress of actual technologies being optimised for the 1) production of whey derived cheese ripening prototypes, 2) GOS and LBA enriched whey for use in Cosmetic/Nutraceutical Prototypes 3) Pre-fermented ingredients from cereal side streams for use in bakery products and 4) PHA from Paper and Pulp wastewater biomasses for application in animal feeds and biobased packaging films. WP3 is now complete. All eight pilot systems have been successfully set up and optimized for demonstration scale trials. The pilot systems have been used to produce the following ingredients: LBA-enriched whey, GOS-enriched whey, purified LBA, purified GOS, safe yeast biomasses (Yarrowia lipolytica), wheat and rye preferments, PHA-enriched biomass, and purified PHA. These ingredients have been used in food, feed, cosmetics, nutraceutical, pharmaceutical and packaging formulations and been validated in industrial environments in the final period. The technologies and products that have been produced have been optimised for scale up to larger pilot scale production models in WP4 and WP5 demonstration, both completed in the final year of the project.
The activities of WP7 successfully produced an extensive report on the hazardous chemicals being used in the project and the associated risks. By-products, ingredients and prototypes developed within INGREEN were critically evaluated for their registration and classification as hazardous for health and the environment, according to REACH, CLP, BPR and CLH regulations.
In the second reporting period, initial LCA studies have been elaborated for the production of PHA[1]enriched biomass, PHA-biopolymer film for bag-in-box application and PHA-enriched nutritious prebiotic feeds in WP6.
The processes for the production of innovative cheeses, bakery products and prefermented ingredients were also evaluated.
Also in WP6 for the TEA, the foundations were established to study the economic feasibility of the INGREEN innovative ingredients on a commercial scale manufacturing process and full analyses have been completed based on the input data from the demonstration activities.
Within WP8, dissemination activities continued and several internal exploitation workshops have been completed. It is expected that several of the prototypes currently being developed will result in exploitable intellectual property, like filed patent applications and trade secrets, a few of which have been initiated and will continue beyond the end of the project. Furthermore, the project website and social media accounts are active to broadly communicate about the project objectives and results, as reported under WP8.
Specifically in the 3rd reporting period, several newsletters were distributed, numerous posts were made on social media, results were presented at several scientific conferences and multiple scientific papers were published. Partners participated in external training events.
Regarding exploitation activities and the market approach, several internal exploitation workshops were held to make an inventory of market needs and size for commercialization and to identify exploitable results and exploitation of IPR, and to evaluate commercial scenarios.
