Project duration: 01/2018 - 03/2022
Persons in charge: Thomas Uhrig M.Sc., Prof. Dr.-Ing. Heidrun Steinmetz, Julia Zimmer
Funding: Willy-Hager Foundation, Stuttgart
Today, conventional plastics are mainly produced from crude oil, whose availability is limited and its production is not sustainable. The lack of significant resources in Europe and Germany also leads to considerable political dependencies. In addition to the finite nature, the climate-damaging nature and the polluting production of the raw material crude oil, the high resistance of plastics to natural decomposition processes (chemical/physical or biological decomposition) represents a considerable environmental problem and leads to an increasing accumulation of discarded plastic materials in the environment. To reduce these problems, it is necessary to develop new, environmentally friendly and resource-conserving production processes that replace crude oil with sustainably extracted raw materials. Initial research results in highly simplified systems show that both primary sludge from municipal wastewater treatment plants and wastewater with a high organic content can be such an alternative source of raw materials. At present, however, there are still considerable gaps in knowledge, both in basic process understanding and in the development of a coordinated process chain and process control.
The overarching goal of this project is therefore the further development of a process chain for biopolymer production from wastewater streams in the food industry. The project should make a substantial contribution to improving the understanding of the process and the factors influencing the individual steps of biopolymer production from wastewater. Building on this, the process chain will be successively closed in order to be able to evaluate the effects of different general conditions and operating settings on the biopolymer yield and composition. By developing C&I strategies, a permanently stable operation is to be achieved even with fluctuating wastewater composition.