Biopolymer production from industrial wastewater streams part III
Project duration: 03/2025- 12/2025
Persons in charge: Cora Laumeyer, M.Sc., Prof. Dr.-Ing. Heidrun Steinmetz
Funding: Willy-Hager Foundation, Stuttgart
Today, conventional plastics are mainly produced from crude oils whose availability is limited and whose extraction is not sustainable. In Europe and Germany, the lack of significant own resources also leads to considerable political dependencies. In addition to the finite nature, the harmfulness to the climate and the polluting extraction of crude oil as a raw material, the high resistance of plastics to natural decomposition processes (chemical/physical or biological degradation) poses a considerable environmental problem and ensures an increasing accumulation of discarded plastic materials in the environment. To mitigate these problems, the development of new, environmentally, and resource-friendly manufacturing processes that substitute petroleum with sustainably sourced raw materials is required. The production of a biodegradable polymer (PHA) using mixed bacterial cultures and wastewater streams as a sustainable and cheap source of raw materials could solve this problem and contribute to the production of a higher proportion of environmentally friendly plastic. Despite successful research by various research groups aimed at enabling the large-scale implementation of this process, there are still some obstacles that need to be overcome before industrial production can take place.
One of these problems is the overall yield of the process, which is not only influenced by the PHA content of the bacterial cells, but also significantly by the solids content of the system. This factor is often not mentioned in scientific publications, but according to our own observations it is an important adjusting screw within the process. The project thus follows on from the previous projects "Biopolymer production from industrial wastewater streams - influencing factors on sub-processes and development of measurement-control strategies to close the process chain" (duration until 03/2022) and “Biopolymer production from industrial wastewater streams - Part II - Adjustment of process conditions and adaptation of the biocoenosis to influence the polymer composition” (duration until 06/2024).
In addition, approaches for continuous production are to be developed and also carried out on a pilot scale within the project duration. Analysing the produced biopolymers will enable a deeper understanding of the influences of the various process stages on the biopolymer properties and contribute to further development of the process chain for biopolymer production from industrial wastewater streams.