Cold Plasma Assisted Resource Recovery from Agri-food Industry Wastes (Spark GREEN)

The “Cold Plasma Assisted Resource Recovery from Agri-food Industry Wastes (Spark GREEN)” project is funded by the Alliance of International Science Organisations (ANSO) and it is now in its second year. The project is a partnership between Loughborough University, the Faculty of Technology and Metallurgy of the Belgrade University (Serbia), National Technical University of Athens (Greece), and Shanghai Advanced Research Institute (China), and will run 2023-2026. Dr Tanja Radu is the co-investigator in front of Loughborough University.

Spark GREEN addresses the issue of the increasing amounts of agricultural residues worldwide. China is the world leader in its cumulative generation of agricultural wastes and Europe is the fourth. The main obstacle for the valorization of biomass is the recalcitrant nature of dominantly present lignocellulose and variability in biomass composition which decreases the already modest efficiency of acid/alkaline thermal treatment conventionally used in biorefineries.

Conventional treatments have low selectivity, generate inhibitory compounds of enzymes or microorganisms used in biorefineries and have a high environmental footprint. The SparkGREEN project will combine the green emerging technology of cold plasma treatment (CPT) with tunable characteristics of natural deep eutectic solvents (NADES) for the fractionation of biomass. The scalable process for the recovery and production of high-value compounds from cereal straws and herbs will be developed. We will examine the best routes for valorization of carbohydrate fraction based on yield/value– for the pharma/food industry, fermentative biorefineries towards the production of platform chemicals (e.g. biobutanol) or anaerobic digestion. Increasing waste biodegradability will enable us to unlock its full potential for both energy and high-value product recovery from waste.

In the second year of the project, Loughborough will host a researcher from Belgrade University, Serbia. They will work alongside our PhD students on scaling up the CPT treatment in a microbubble plasma reactor and optimisation of plasma pretreatment methodology. Furthermore, a Workshop on IP protection and Tech Transfer will be held at the Shanghai Advanced Research Institute – Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. Experts from China and Europe will be invited to present best practices which proved successful in different countries and markets.