CIRCULAR BIOCARBON is a first-of-its-kind flagship biorefinery designed to turn the organic fraction of municipal solid waste and sewage sludge into high added-value end products. CIRCULAR BIOCARBON will mitigate the environmental impacts generated by urban waste streams by reducing landfilling, incineration and greenhouse gas emissions.
The main objective of the CIRCULAR BIOCARBON project is to open up new business frameworks, based on a new circular vision of the urban solid waste and sludge treatment towards a sustainable bioeconomy, and to optimise the management of both the organic fraction of solid urban waste and sewage sludge, making the most of all the carbon generated in a population centre. Some of the products that will be obtained are tailor-made bio-based fertilisers, diamond-like carbon coatings, graphene, and bioplastics, as well as a variety of intermediate products such as proteins, struvite, ammonium salts and algal bio-stimulants.
A step in the direction of the sustainable bio-economy
The CIRCULAR BIOCARBON biorefinery, organised through a pool of cascading technologies, start from anaerobic process steps (after proper pretreatment) of mixed urban waste streams, of which organic fraction of municipal solid waste is the main one, in order to treat all the biowaste produced by a medium-size city. At the end of the project, a commercial scale biorefinery will be fully operative at Urbaser's Alfonso Maíllo Waste Treatment Technological Innovation Center in Zaragoza, Spain. To maximise replicability and boost the impacts on the market and on society, the biorefinery will be operated on an industrial-commercial scale, and actors leading the territorial waste management schemes and policies will be engaged.
In the project CemeCon will be responsible for demonstrating the value of and utilize the urban waste produced. We will replace materials based on fossil fuels in our production and valorise the produced building blocks to produce coatings so that we can provide our customers with coatings with an even lower carbon footprint than today. The project is in line with the company’s commitment to quest for solutions that promote circular economy and contribute to achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12, which seeks to ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.