GRECO aims to demonstrate the life cycle and techno-economic feasibility of greener & safer bioplastics value chains for the food packaging sector, based on a safe and sustainable by design (SSbD) strategy. To this aim, innovative bio-based, biodegradable, and recyclable packaging based on new PLA copolymers, coatings, additives and catalysts accompanied by surface treatments will be produced. Regulatory compliance will be demonstrated while contributions to new or modified standards and proper labelling will be proposed. Digital tools will drive the developments from the simulation and modelling scopes, and social sciences and humanities (SSH) will provide relevant information related to social perception and acceptance. All of them will pave the way to facilitate the introduction of the new products into the packaging market sector and our society. Contribution to the Plastics Strategy, the Single-use Plastics Directive (SUP) and the EU Circular Economy Action plan (CEAP) will be ensured. GRECO will introduce the food packaging industry to groundbreaking bio-based, SSbD, and fully circular PLA-based materials, that meet diverse application needs. These alternatives aim to replace fossil-based, complex, and multimaterial structures prevalent in the industry, improving packaging end-of-life through biodegradation in various environments like industrial and home compostability, anaerobic, marine, and soil. The design will ensure recyclability and avoiding of chemical interactions that hinder overall biodegradation.

A world record power 2.5kW laser providing from picosecond down to femtoseconds pulses at repetition rates up to 1GHz with excellent beam quality will be developed and brought to the market at highly competitive costs enabling widespread industrial uptake. By harnessing the unique characteristics of patent protected tapered double-clad fiber amplifiers power-scaled multichannel laser, unparalleled high-power beam qualities, M2<1.1, and pulse energies 2.5-250µJ will be achieved. Using the state-of-the-art highly stable laser diodes as seed lasers allowing parameter flexibility by ultrafast electrical control of pulse duration and repetition rate will a broad range of high-power laser processing application requirements to be met. An extremely stable advanced all-fiber based configuration allow development of a compact ultrashort pulse laser system. A newly-designed delivery fiber utilising cutting-edge technology of high purity glass material fabrication will be used to capable of handling the very high power ultra-short pulses, preserving beam quality over several meters distance. Pioneering technology based on 3D nano-imprint lithography will be exploited to produce coherent beam combining optics and fiber-facet-integrated micro-lenses for advanced beam shaping elements to elongate voxels. Together these will provide laser pulse delivery via patented polygon scanner technology capable of handling high-power pulses at speeds of up to 1.5 km/s. These will enable demonstration in automotive and renewable energy sectors of ultrafast 3D ablation, low-thermal welding of dissimilar metals and faster cost-effective cutting of ultra-hard materials. Exploitation in the form of high-power laser processing systems will immediately follow, benefitting from the unmatched performance data and detailed cost benefit and investment case analysis performed.

Routine clinical use of biomaterials requires the reduction of the economical and ethical costs of biocompatibility tests (ISO10993 EU norm) which are unsustainable for small-medium industries and for the society. In this project we foster an unprecedented breakthrough in in-vivo optical imaging that will radically renew the biocompatibility tests of biomaterials. A micro-structured chip, built by two-photon laser polymerization (2PP), will be implanted in lab animals, host a biomaterial and contain micro-features that guide the spontaneous regeneration of vascularized tissue within a thin gap (0.15mm) in contact with the biomaterial and act as beacons to correct the optical aberrations. The same chip carries a micro-lenses array for in-situ multi-spot imaging, with no need of external high numerical aperture objectives, dramatically improving light penetration in tissue. This chip will recast our thinking of deep tissue in-vivo imaging: the mice carry their own imaging optics, thus reducing substantially image aberration issues allowing unprecedented quantitative and longitudinal analyses of the host inflammatory response to the implant, without sacrificing the mice at each time step. The project will allow unique quantification of the immune reaction to biomaterials at the cellular level (scientific impact), reduce (at least threefold) the number of used animals (societal impact) and the costs of biomaterial discovery (economical impact), and will Refine and Reduce protocols for biocompatibility on a single revolutionary device (regulatory impact). We open here a new visionary path for in-vivo imaging with high Replacement potential in oncological pharmaceutics and immune-therapies. 4 academic units, 1 public research institute and 2 SMEs ensure a highly inter-sectorial/interdisciplinary approach encompassing non-linear intravital imaging, bioengineering design, 2PP material science, biocompatibility protocols design and numerical simulations of immune response.

Recent developments render the biobased sector a key player in European Economy providing a great impetus towards Circular Business Models of resource efficiency. Developments in biobased nanomaterials are coupled with biotechnologies applied to biomass converting the renewable resources into high added-value polymers. BIOMAC will establish an Open Innovation Test Bed (OITB) Ecosystem providing open access to SMEs or Industry to a single-entry point. Starting from the utilization of biomass sources followed by the production of biobased nanoparticles and different building blocks the ecosystem produces biopolymers for the strategic sectors of Food Packaging, Construction, Automotive and Printed Electronics which consist a high market share. A self-sustainable open innovation ecosystem for the upscaling of upscaled processes across the supply and value chain is intended to be created in order fill this gap. Although the last two decades a high number of publications have been only a very limited number of such cases has been finally commercialized and reached the market end users. Some of the reasons that these have not been adopted by the market are lack of investment, funding for further development, upscaling and the limited willingness of end users to adopt nanomaterials into their processes, this is the ‘valley of death’ which BIOMAC intends to overcome. The OITB will offer services that cover the assessment of regulation & safety, sustainability, circularity and market potential among with modeling, process control, standardization and characterization; accessible at fair conditions and cost. BIOMAC establishes a concrete community of open collaboration for stakeholders and customers enabling innovation and minimization of investment risks. This will be achieved by offering an open innovation ecosystem, in which technologies that have been developed up to TRL4-5 will be able to be upscaled and validated up to TRL 7.