Whey Permeate (WP) and De-lactosed Whey Permeate (DLP) are major side-streams of dairy processing and represent a key challenge for the dairy industry due to a lack of reliability in current disposal routes and represent a sustainability bottleneck for the expansion of milk production in Europe in the “post-milk-quota era”. AgriChemWhey will build a first-of-a-kind, industrial-scale biorefinery with integrated symbiotic industrial and agricultural value chains that will valorise over 25,000 tonnes (100% dry matter) per annum of excess WP and DLP to several added value products for growing global markets including lactic acid, polylactic acid, minerals for human nutrition and bio-based fertilisers. This will be achieved through a coordinated investment process and development path to realise the Flagship plant, representing the first major industrial venture to convert residues from food processing, as second generation feedstocks, to value added bio-based products. The Flagship will prove the techno-economic viability of the innovative WP/DLP-to-lactic acid biorefinery technology and will establish a new value chain for industrial symbiosis with other local actors for the production of high value sustainable food and feed (including high quality mushrooms) products from other side streams, as an enhanced circular bioeconomy approach to agriculture and agri-food waste. This offers society and industry the opportunity for greater resource efficiency - less food waste, more products from the same starting material (milk), and integration of food and non-food material production. AgriChemWhey will also develop a blueprint of an economic sustainability concept and replication plans for other regions across Europe, thus maximising both short and long term impacts, contributing towards the development of the European bioeconomy to promote rural growth, competitiveness and job creation, and aligning with European sustainability targets.

Plant dry matter, so-called lignocellulosic biomass, is the largest renewable biomass feedstock on Earth. Europe has over 14 mill tons of sugar residuals from biorefineries, which could be converted to profitable products and contribute to a sustainable bioeconomy. Unfortunately, existing biorefineries struggle with technical issues and low profitability due to the lack of adequate fermentation processes. Therefore, these sugars are either incinerated to generate energy or at best converted to ethanol (€0.6 /kg) but not to higher value chemicals. Current concepts that aim to establish fermentation processes to convert residual sugar streams to high value products face challenges including inefficient sugar utilization by microorganisms and inhibitors in the residual streams, leading to low productivity and yields. Our project aims to recover high value compounds from sugar residuals, and to turn fermentation processes converting these residual to antimicrobials cost effective. We will recover the high value sugar galactose (€40-200 /kg) from residual streams as part of their treatment process. By genome editing technique, we will design cell factories that consume the remaining residuals and produce nisin (€50-150 /kg), an industrially important commercial food/feed preservative. Additionally, we will develop an affordable, online feedback add-on system that will allow to intelligently change residual mixture during fermentation of these cell factories to optimize production online during the process. In a 150 L industrial bioreactor, we will demonstrate that our add-on invention iFermenter - increases the yields of nisin by over 2 fold - increases the pediocin production by over 50% compared to what is possible today, - and reduce at least 20% in CO2 footprint with this process compared to existing solutions. Thus, iFermenter will render production of high value products with residual sugar stream highly efficient and cost-effective contributing to circular economy.