Sewage contains valuable substances that can be used as raw materials for biobased products. However, in North West Europe this potential is hardly exploited yet. The Interreg North-West Europe project WOW! aims to make the transition to a more circular approach by matching supply and demand of cellulose, lipids and PHA bioplastics from sewage!
Centre of Expertise Biobased Economy is participation in this project. Gabriela Fajardo, intern from Avans UAS: has been working on WOW! aiming to develop the PHA production process. She found a purification process to make the PHA colorless.
“My name is Gabriela Fajardo and I am an intern from Avans University of Applied Sciences. In the past few months I have been working on WOW! aiming to develop the PHA production process. So far we have been successful in finding a green solvent for the extraction of the PHA from the biomass but the plastic presents a brown color that may not be desired in some applications. To widen its application, we are now working in finding a purification process to make the PHA colorless. We have had some promising results on that as can be seen in the pictures below. Picture A is the extracted PHA with impurities that gives it a brown color while picture B is the purified PHA with almost any color on it.”
Read more news about the WOW! project in the WOW! news update.
