Twelve partners from seven European countries will demonstrate the full value chain from biogenic CO2 from wastewater sludge to the end-use of polymers as part of the four-year Horizon Europe project. HICCUPS includes partners with expertise across the value chain, from the capture of biogenic carbon dioxide to the production of packaging materials. Partners include large companies, universities, SMEs and technology research centres.
Partners
ACCIONA
ACCIONA Water Business is worldwide leader in the water treatment sector. The company is focused in the management of the integrated water cycle, and in the design, construction, commissioning and operation of a large variety of water treatment plants, including drinking water treatment plants, wastewater treatment plants, reverse osmosis desalination plants and tertiary treatments for water reuse. ACCIONA is committed to innovation by implementing the latest technologies with the ultimate goal of guaranteeing water quality in a sustainable way.
aqualung
Aqualung’s membrane technology aims at accelerating decarbonisation and mitigate carbon emission costs by offering a safe, absorbent-free and highly compact carbon capture system for industrial flue gas and biogas. We aim at removing a significant amount of otherwise hard-to-abate CO2. Aqualung will be a driving force in the energy transition by deploying industrial scale carbon capture units, offering a complete well-to-wake solution for industrial CO2-emitters. Aqualung’s compact and efficient technology has no toxic additives or need for expensive facility re-design. The carbon capture units will be scalable modular solutions with the Aqualung patented membrane technology at the heart of the process. Retrofitting our unit onto existing brownfield sites will aggregate clusters of industrial emitters, thus improving the economics for all participants. The company operates from three different locations : Oslo (Norway), London (UK) and Milwaukee (US).
Avantium
Avantium is a pioneer in the emerging industry of renewable and sustainable chemistry. Avantium is headquartered in Amsterdam, employing approximately 270 people, with extensive R&D laboratories and three pilot plants in Geleen and Delfzijl, the Netherlands. We are an innovation-driven company dedicated to developing and commercializing breakthrough technologies for the production of chemicals from renewable sources and circular plastic materials used for a variety of consumer products. One of Avantium’s innovative technology platforms is called Volta Technology and uses electrochemistry to convert CO2 to high-value products and chemical building blocks such as formic acid, oxalic acid and glycolic acid. The latter two are key building blocks for polyesters and other materials, allowing production of CO2 negative plastics.
FUNDITEC
FUNDITEC is a private non-profit organization created in 2003, as an R+D+i Centre for two key sectors: Advanced Materials and Cybersecurity. Its mission is to offer applied research and technology services in the field of advanced materials and cybersecurity that can improve the profits and sustainability of its clients. It has a team, with more than 15 years of experience in technical execution and project management, made up of highly qualified engineers, chemists, doctors and scientists with extensive experience in the development of products, processes and prototypes.
FUNDITEC’s capabilities within the Advanced Materials area cover lines of research such as: nanotechnology, coatings and resins, biomaterials, agri-food solutions, food technology, catalysis and photocatalysis processes, water treatment and waste recovery.
INRAE
The French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE) is a major player globally in research and innovation. Gathering a community of 12,000 people with 273 units including fundamental and experimental research, spread out throughout 18 regional centres in France.
Internationally, INRAE is among the top research organisations in agricultural and food sciences, plant and animal sciences, as well as in ecology and environmental science. It is the world’s leading research organisation specialising in agriculture, food and the environment.
Faced with a growing world population, climate change, the depletion of resources and declining biodiversity, the Institute has a major role to play in providing the knowledge base supporting the necessary acceleration of agricultural, food and environmental transitions, to address the major global challenges.
nova-Institute
The nova-Institut GmbH has been working in the field of sustainability since the mid-1990s and today focuses primarily on the areas of circular economy, bioeconomy and CO2 utilisation. The independent company supports the chemical and plastics industries in the transition from fossil to renewable carbon – based on biomass, CO2 utilisation or recycling – through research and science-based consulting.
Both in accompanying research for innovation projects and in individual business consulting, nova’s interdisciplinary team covers the entire value chain. It works on all topics from raw materials, technology scouting and market research to economics, policy, life cycle assessments and sustainability, as well as support in communication and strategy development.
SINTEF
SINTEF AS is the largest independent research organization in Scandinavia. SINTEF has a broadly based, multidisciplinary research concern that possesses international top-level expertise in technology, medicine, and the social sciences. SINTEF is an independent, non-commercial organization. The profits of their contract research projects are invested in new research, scientific equipment, and competence development. SINTEF employs 2200 staff who come from 80 different countries. SINTEF is represented in this consortium by the department of Sustainable Energy (part of the SINTEF Industry institute), with the Thin Film and Membrane Technology (TFMT) located in Oslo. The Sustainable Energy department has a broad experience about separation technologies as well as electrochemical processes. SINTEF Industry is active in the research of advanced membrane-based technologies for gas and vapour separation, with main reference to CO2 capture. The work covers the whole development lines from fundamental research on material synthesis, characterization and shaping via materials testing and process modelling to upscaling, benchmarking, and life chain analyses studies. Gas processes based on membranes have been studied through the last 20 years for different application ranging from carbon capture to H2 production and represents a core activity in SINTEF’s future development strategy.
Tecnopackaging
Tecnopackaging is a technology-based Small-Medium Enterprise (SME) founded in 2010 as a spin-off of AITIIP Technology Centre located in Zaragoza, involved in the development of innovative plastic materials and products. Tecnopackaging´s main purpose is to conduct R&D on advanced polymeric materials and their transformation processes for industrial plastic applications, targeting companies which operate directly or indirectly in the agri-food and other industrial sectors such as automotive, construction, biomedical and aeronautical. The core of the company is the development of new nanoadditivated, biodegradable, and antimicrobial (bio)materials and products with technological equipment for processing plastics, including extrusion-compounding, injection, extrusion blow molding, thermoforming, and film-blowing.
University of Amsterdam
The University of Amsterdam (UvA) is the largest university in the Netherlands by enrolment and the fourth-oldest Dutch academic institution still in operation. It is a public research university with more than 40,000 students, about 6,000 staff and some 3,000 PhD students in seven faculties. At the Faculty of Science, the Van ‘t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences is home to chemistry research in Analytical Chemistry, Computational Chemistry, Molecular Photonics and Sustainable Chemistry. It partners in HICCUPS through the Industrial Sustainable Chemistry group, focusing on the transition to a circular economy and the transition from a fossil-based to a bio-based economy with emphasis on plastics.
University of Ferrara
University of Ferrara (Unife) established in 1391 by the Marquis Alberto V d’Este, is one of the oldest universities in Europe. Unife has about 27000 undergraduate students in all areas of sciences, more than 1100 international students and 750 permanent academic staff.
Unife participates in HICCUPS trough the research team on Biobased and Green Polymers. The team is headed by professor Monica Bertoldo and operates at the Department of Chemical, Pharmaceutical and Agricultural Science. The group carried out research to increase the environmental sustainability of polymers in different applications and in HICCUPS the team will support the exploitation of the new CO2-derived polymers in coatings for food-packaging application.
VTT
VTT is one of Europe’s leading research institutions with 2213 employees of which 32 % has doctorate or licentiate degree, women make up 40% of our workforce, total revenue was 261 M€ and customer base was 1109 in 2022. VTT is owned by the Finnish state. Our strategy is to lead a path of exponential hope with science-based innovation. Through scientific and technological means, VTT turns large global challenges into sustainable growth for businesses and society creating jobs and wellbeing and bringing exponential hope. VTT brings together people, business, science and technology to solve the biggest challenges of our time.
Walki
Walki transforms materials for a circular future and towards a sustainable society by extending products life cycle and embracing resource efficiency. We are an industry leading advanced materials conversion specialist delivering transformative, sustainable solutions to solve the most demanding challenges in packaging and the built environment. Walki is a growing international group organized in three business areas: Consumer Packaging, Industrial Packaging and Engineered Materials, with operations in eleven different countries, both in Europe and Asia. In 2022, the Group’s annual turnover was approx. 705 million euros employing around 1700 people.