CircularFood – High-quality products through cascading recycling cycles of residual materials from the food industry

In Austria, 1.3 million tonnes of unavoidable organic by-products from food processing are produced annually. These food residues are currently mainly used as animal feed and for biogas production. These non-avoidable organic by-products are regionally available and cheap resources with high-quality (protein) components.

The material and energetic use of food residues and research into new substrates and residues are important measures to promote the Austrian circular economy in order to reduce CO2 emissions, improve soil health and develop sustainable solutions such as organic crop substrates and biofertilisers. The challenges here are to develop efficient processes that make the best possible use of recyclable materials and to feed the resulting residues to the best possible further utilisation.

CircularFood has set itself the goal of recycling regionally available food residues through innovative processes and thus closing the material cycles of selected products. In a circular approach, CircularFood aims to further develop innovative processes and technologies in order to obtain high-quality protein components from different residues for the first time, to investigate the effects on a possible subsequent biogas production, and to develop innovative bio-liquid fertilisers, new growing substrates (peat substitutes) and fertiliser pellets from the fermentation residues.

The technical innovation in the processes lies in the further development of an oscillating extraction reactor with outstanding properties for protein recovery from residues and membrane distillation for ammonium recovery and production of a bio-liquid fertiliser.
In view of the peat phase-out in Austria and the increasing demand for peat-reduced biosubstrates in commercial horticulture, the CircularFood project offers the possibility to use locally available peat substitutes from residual materials and thus enable sustainable self-sufficiency of the farms. In addition to the technical innovations, as well as ecological assessments, the project will investigate which existing tools and databases can be used for possible digital tracing of residues to products. The project intends to assess the overall balance in detail through material and energy accounting, consideration of carbon stability and life cycle analysis to determine whether the circular approach can be considered “net zero” or even “negative emissions”.

CircularFood involved partners are located along the value chain to ensure sustainable and economic utilisation of the project results and to create new products from residues through regional partnerships. The project offers the participating companies (Brauerei Göss, Manner, Resch&Frisch, ALWERA) the opportunity to increase their added value through innovative products, to integrate technological providers (BDI, BIOGEST and TerraGreen) and to achieve long-term positive effects such as multi-regionality, efficient use of resources (Frutura) and reduction of import dependency, while establishing an Austrian community for the use of food residues and cross-location cooperation.