During the times of diminishing natural resources, a huge challenge for our society is to efficiently design, produce, and optimize new safe and sustainable materials for various industrial sectors. Plastics industry has so far been slow to convert away from the non-sustainable petrochemical plastics due to worse economic cost, less than satisfactory manufacturability, and inferior performance of bio-based alternatives. In the proposed project we develop a fully circular manufacturing value chain for bio-manufactured plastics, vitrimerized PolyHydroxyAlkanoates (PHAs). These materials show potential for replacing many petrochemical plastics owing to their thermal, mechanical, and chemical stability. In addition, vitrimerization increases the tractability of PHAs towards manufacturing industries by enabling more flexible processability than traditional plastics, allowing for the introduction and fine control of novel bio-inspired functionalities, such as self-healing, while retaining biodegradability. We propose that these properties, together with the modelling and AI-based tools developed in BIOMAPS will speed-up the adaptation of these biologically produced plastics to replace their petrochemical competitors in the manufacturing industry in Europe. This will be reached starting from low volume, high-value products, which enable establishing circular material loops to first lower the raw material prize before moving towards the high-volume bulk applications. This sets the European manufacturing companies apart from their competitors and positions them as leaders in adopting innovative and environmentally friendly technologies.

The design of biodegradable polymer materials (BDPM) is at the core of BioPackMan, aiming to explore an extended material design space of Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs), Poly(butylensuccinate) and its copolymers (PBS, PBSA) and Polylactic Acid (PLA) to develop tailored compounds that harness synergistic effects, leading to biodegradable, recyclable packaging with application-specific mechanical strength, thermal stability, chemical resistance and gas permeability. Biodegradable compounds will be developed with tailored morphology, to meet diverse flexible & rigid packaging requirements and also embrace a ‘biodegradation as a system property’ approach from initial material and packaging design, considering specific environmental conditions for intended and unintended disposal pathways. By establishing a complete value chain (material producers, compounders, packaging converters and end users), BioPackMan aims to provide a complete set of compounds, sustainable additives and innovative processing technologies for the production of sustainable packaging demonstrators for food, home care and personal care sectors. The target is to obtain benchmark fossil-based products quality, ensuring compliance and safe use in packaging, showcasing that BDPMs can be recycled. Circularity, safety, and sustainability are considered at all stages of development through SSbD framework, and liaise with society & industry, to assure interaction, knowledge exchange and adaptation of circular business models. To secure societal impact, stakeholders will be involved early in the project to identify barriers and facilitate the adoption of sustainable practices.

UPCYCLE aims to demonstrate novel circular value chains that transform currently non-recyclable mixed plastic waste into biodegradable and recyclable materials for packaging applications. Building on the promising results of the H2020 UPLIFT project, UPCYCLE addresses specific scalability hotspots to reach economic viability. The project scales up its novel plastic biorefinery and ecopolymers with a strategy that leverages: (1) A Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design framework to ensure safety (i.e., non-toxic materials), a reduction in GHG emissions (-30%), and economic viability (<40% selling price); (2) AI-powered fast-track innovation for process intensification; (3) A versatile biorefinery process to valorise mixed plastic waste (both fossil- and bio-based) and secondary biomass residues; (4) A smart polymerisation and formulation strategy using bio-based, degradable additives to tune biodegradability and enhance technical performance for four selected packaging use cases. Leveraging a multidisciplinary consortium of top-tier academic institutions and industry leaders, UPCYCLE is poised to create significant impact in the packaging industry. UPCYCLE’s ecopolymers, derived from plastic and biomass waste streams, promote a viable circular business model for European recyclers, polymer processors, compounders, and packaging producers. Moreover, our strategy demonstrates how renewable and upcycled building blocks and additives can be blended into commercially available polymers to delivers novel PHA-, PLA- and Furan-based packaging formulations, to successfully modulate degradability and technical performance, based on the application. By providing the tools to improve properties and economic viability of polymers systems that are already in the market, we provide a fast-track pathway towards impact.