From Waste to Value

Valorisation Pathways for Organic Waste Streams in Circular Bioeconomies

Antje Klitkou, Arne Martin Fevolden, Marco Capasso

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367730772
• eBook ISBN: 9780429863240
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

From Waste to Value investigates how streams of organic waste and residues can be transformed into valuable products, to foster a transition towards a sustainable and circular bioeconomy. The studies are carried out within a cross-disciplinary framework, drawing on a diverse set of theoretical approaches and defining different valorisation pathways.

Organic waste streams from households and industry are becoming a valuable resource in today's economies. Substances that have long represented a cost to companies and a burden for society are now becoming an asset. Waste products, such as leftover food, forest residues and animal carcasses, can be turned into valuable products such as biomaterials, biochemicals and biopharmaceuticals. Exploiting these waste resources is challenging, however. It requires that companies develop new technologies and that public authorities introduce new regulation and governance models.

This book helps policy-makers govern and regulate bio-based industries, and helps industry actors to identify and exploit new opportunities in the circular bioeconomy. Moreover, it provides important insights for all students and scholars concerned with renewable energy, sustainable development and climate change.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1 Introduction

Antje Klitkou, Arne Martin Fevolden and Marco Capasso

Organic waste and other residual materials from bio-based industries and households are of increasing value in today’s economy. Substances that have long represented a cost to the economy are now becoming a valuable resource. Exploiting the full potential of these resources requires increased innovation and systemic change as well as better regulation and governance – or, in other words, a transition to a sustainable bioeconomy.

The transition to a sustainable bioeconomy has been on the agenda in policy, academia and business circles worldwide. Developing this sustainable bioeconomy is considered to be critical for several reasons: the need for the sustainable use of resources, the growing demand for food, materials and energy, and the need to decouple economic growth from environmental degradation. However, a sustainable bioeconomy will only emerge when certain challenges are addressed.

First, the entire economy must be involved in the transition process. The sustainable and circular bioeconomy will not only transform traditional bio-industries such as food production and forestry, it will also transform all sectors of the economy. Fossil resources must be replaced by renewable bio-resources in many industries and organic residuals and side-streams must be exploited for sustainable value creation. The transition requires a focus on the circularity of value creation: side-streams and former waste streams can become new input factors for new value circles. The valorisation of waste streams necessitates a higher degree of coordination along and across industries.

Second, a wide range of policy instruments must be employed. Traditional policy instruments, such as generic tax exemptions and R&D funding, are insufficient to foster such a comprehensive transition process and need to be complemented by other types of instruments, such as public procurement, new standards, regional specialisation strategies and entrepreneurship initiatives. In addition, policymakers must take into account the geographic embeddedness of the waste streams and the need for changes in the established rules of the game.

Third, researchers from diverse fields of study must be involved. The transition to a bioeconomy is a complex process and therefore interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches need to be developed in order to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and experience across the established groups of actors and sectors. However, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations are challenging, since partners work under different incentive structures and draw on different knowledge bases.

This book addresses these challenges through a holistic approach: (1) analyses of value chains crossing the established sector boundaries, (2) analyses of policy and governance perspective on the transition process and (3) interdisciplinary studies of the bioeconomy.

1.1 Framework

1.1.1 Background

Over the last decade, the notion of grand challenges has emerged as a central issue in policymaking and in academic discourse. The Lund Declaration (2009) stressed the urgency of pursuing solutions to the so-called grand societal challenges, such as climate change, food security, health, industrial restructuring and energy security. All these challenges are persistent problems which require long-term approaches and are highly complex, difficult to manage and characterised by uncertainties (Coenen, Hansen & Rekers, 2015; Schuitmaker, 2012). The concept of a bioeconomy has been introduced as an important pathway for addressing several of these challenges. Replacing fossil-based products with products based on organic waste resources is an important strategy not only for mitigating climate change, but also for fostering industrial restructuring, improving public health and ensuring food and energy security (Ollikainen, 2014; Pülzl, Kleinschmit & Arts, 2014; Richardson, 2012).

However, as Bugge et al. (2016) have pointed out, there seems to be little consensus about what a bioeconomy actually implies. Visions of the bioeconomy range from one that is very closely connected to the increasing use of biotechnology across sectors (e.g. Wield, 2013), to one where the focus is on the use of biological material (e.g. McCormick & Kautto, 2013). Others call for a shift towards locally embedded eco-economies, which use local good practice as the starting point (Marsden, 2012). Thus, describing the bioeconomy, it has been argued that “its meaning still seems in a flux” (Pfau, Hagens, Dankbaar & Smits, 2014; Pülzl et al., 2014, p. 386) and that the knowledge-based bioeconomy can be characterised as a “master narrative” (Levidow, Birch & Papaioannou, 2013, p. 95), which is open to very different interpretations (Bugge et al., 2016, p. 1f.). The different perspectives on the bioeconomy can roughly be aligned into three points of view: (1) the OECD’s and the United States’ focus on processes that convert raw material into value-added products using biotechnology and life sciences; (2) the European Union’s emphasis on the use of biomass resources, such as biological resources and waste, as inputs for food, feed, energy and industrial products; and (3) environmental scientists’ and NGOs’ concentration on sustainability and planetary boundaries (Kleinschmit et al., 2014).

While the first European bioeconomy strategy had a focus on bioeconomy research and innovation to tackle the grand societal challenges (European Commission, 2012), the updated European bioeconomy strategy (European Commission, 2018) stresses the need for sustainability and circularity of the bioeconomy. A sustainable bioeconomy “can turn bio-waste, residues and discards into valuable resources and can create the innovations and incentives to help retailers and consumers cut food waste by 50% by 2030” (European Commission, 2018, p. 6).

The world’s population is expected to increase from seven billion in 2012 to more than nine billion by 2050 (European Commission, 2012). This means that there will be an increased need for food, feed and many other bio-based materials. Reducing and preventing food waste is one important avenue to take. However, not all food waste can be avoided; therefore, we need to exploit this resource for other means of value creation.

Many authors emphasise the need to use new types of resource for producing food, feed and other bio-based materials. These resources require different technological pathways to the traditional bio-processing industry. Such pathways are provided, among others, by biological treatment (biogas production) and biorefining.

Biological treatment with anaerobic digestion is based on different types of feedstock, such as urban organic waste, food waste from the food processing industry and manure. One output is biogas, which can be used in transport as a replacement for fossil fuels. The other output is bio-digest, which can be used as a replacement for artificial fertiliser. This returns nutrients back into the soil. Lantz et al. have discussed the potential incentives and barriers for an expansion of biogas technology in the Swedish context, including the complete biogas chain from feedstock production to the final utilisation of biogas and the digested residues (Lantz, Svensson, Bjornsson & Borjesson, 2007). They distinguish between barriers to the production of biogas and barriers to the utilisation of biogas and digestate, and use a life cycle assessment (LCA) in order to estimate the potential for biogas production from waste resources found in different sectors and sources. Their scientific contribution resulted in a lively debate in Sweden about the agricultural use of sewage sludge from wastewater treatment plants; the debate in turn originated from frequent alarming reports of the possible presence of undesirable substances in the sludge. To ensure the quality of the digestate, a set of rules and voluntary agreements are used. Manure, being a by-product which does not require any additional handling by the farmer, is often considerably more easily available to the biogas producer, and its use is especially profitable if transportation costs are covered.

Another pathway is provided by biorefineries. Biorefineries can be classified in different ways (Parajuli et al., 2015) based on the types of raw material input used for the process, such as straw and stover from plant production, residues from food processing, sludge from wastewater treatment, residues from fish processing, aquaculture and residues from forestry and forest-based industries. A further classification is based on the applied technology: biochemical or thermochemical (based on gasification and/or pyrolysis). A third classification distinguishes between the main intermediate products produced in the biorefinery, such as syngas, sugar and lignin. Biorefineries must be optimised for the efficient use of bio-resources, energy use and recovery of valuable compounds, such as proteins and phosphorus. In the Scandinavian context, all these resource streams are valuable, but straw and stover might, due to the structure of the Danish agricultural sector, be more important for Denmark than for Norway and Sweden. Forestry residues have been exploited by biorefinery companies, such as Borregaard in Norway and Domsjö in Sweden. Biorefineries not only enable the replacement of fossil resources with renewable, organic resources in the production of materials and chemicals, but also allow for the production of new types of materials with different qualities to those of fossil-based materials.

When assessing the sustainability of biological treatment and biorefining processes, there are several elements to consider: (1) the mobilisation of waste and residue streams from the agricultural, forestry and food sectors; (2) technological options for converting biomass into biomaterials and bioenergy; and (3) the sustainability of bio-based products compared to traditional products (Kretschmer, Buckwell, Smith, Watkins & Allen, 2013). Food waste, crop and forest residues have significant potential as bio-resources since they offer a range of potential energy outputs from 1.55 to 5.56 EJ per year. The majority (over 90%) of this potential energy output is offered by crop and forest residues. The extent of biomass-based products on the market is influenced by three factors: feedstock availability and its price, market demand and investment decisions, which again are influenced by the maturity of the chosen technology and its economic viability.

When assessing the sustainability of bio-based products, Kretschmer et al. (2013) stress two issues for analysis: efficient use of biomass resources, incl. residues and waste, and greenhouse gas emission effects. LCAs can provide an evaluation of the sustainability of bio-based products. When analysing the effects of greenhouse gas emission, the consequences of diverting residues from previous uses (straw and forest residues) must be considered. While the replacement of fossil fuels by first-generation biofuels can be assessed as unsustainable, the massive deployment of advanced biofuels from forestry and agricultural residues can also have unintended environmental consequences and lead to new path dependencies. A resource-efficient use of biomass is not only related to replacing energy crops by using agricultural and forestry residues, but also to the cascading use of these bio-resources, which implies a shift from high volumes towards lower volumes, and from low added value to high added value.

1.1.2 Defining the concepts – waste valorisation, circularity, sustainable business models and the bioeconomy

This book explores how streams of organic waste and residues can be transformed into valuable products and thus foster a transition towards a sustainable and circular bioeconomy. When investigating this subject, some questions immediately arise: what is the bioeconomy, what is the circular bioeconomy and why is it sustainable? And, last but not least, what is organic waste and what are valorisation pathways?

A number of different definitions of “bioeconomy” exist (Bugge et al., 2016; Schmid, Padel & Levidov, 2012). In this book, we define bioeconomy as the set of economic activities related to the sustainable production and use of renewable biological feedstock and processes to generate economic outputs in the form of bio-based food, feed, energy, materials or chemicals. A bioeconomy is “sustainable” as far as it is maintaining our environment and protecting food quality and biodiversity. A “circular” bioeconomy means that the existing renewable bio-resources are used in an efficient way, which means that organic waste, co-products and by-products are treated as resources for the bioeconomy. Strategies to achieve this circularity include the following processes: prevention and reduction of organic waste streams, finding new highly valued bio-products based on the re-use of organic by-products, co-products, residues and waste streams, recycling of organic waste and residues, and recovering of the energy content of organic waste streams.

The cascading use of biomass and waste resources has become an important way in which to improve resource efficiency. This principle implies that burning such resources should be the last option, to be adopted only when no other use can be envisioned (de Besi & McCormick, 2015). Biomass resources have been extensively used for energy production, both for heat and power, as well as in relation to waste-to-energy processes. However, following the principles of cascading use of bio-resources, other renewable energy resources should instead be used for energy production (Knauf, 2015; Suominen, Kunttu, Jasinevicius, Tuomasjukka & Lindner, 2017).

These processes often cross existing sectoral borders in the bioeconomy: waste streams and by-products from agriculture or forestry might become a resource for aquaculture or biochemical industry, or vice versa. Urban organic waste can be transformed into biogas for transport and into fertiliser, replacing artificial fertiliser or peat-based compost. Different waste streams can be combined to produce new types of products, not just biogas and fertiliser, but also new feed sources. However, the expression “circular bioeconomy” can be seen as something of an idealised concept, since some materials will always be lost or degraded as they move along supply chains.

What is organic waste? There have been several attempts to define organic waste streams by providing important inclusion and exclusion criteria. The United Nations Statistics Division distinguishes waste from other residues in the following way: waste includes materials which are not prime products and the generator has no further use for these resources and discards them, or intends or is required to discard them. This means that the definition of waste is dynamic: (1) since the generator can change the production process and can introduce new processes which exploit the former waste streams, (2) the regulator might change the requirements for what should be discarded and (3) the generator might identify a demand for the resource from other firms and start trading the materials as a good. On the other hand, waste streams, by definition, exclude residuals which are directly recycled or reused at the place of generation, as well as waste materials which are directly discharged into ambient water or air. The latter means that resource streams which are discharged from fisheries and offshore aquaculture into the oceans are under-reported, which might contribute to the increased pollution of the oceans. In this book, we address the valorisation of both organic waste streams and side-streams. We distinguish between residues which have no economic value and side-streams which already have a value.

Waste valorisation means adding value to residues and side-streams through changes in markets and/or in the physical properties of these materials. Valorisation requires both technological and institutional innovation. When analysing valorisation pathways for organic waste and side-streams we can distinguish between different gro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I: Perspectives on the bioeconomy
• Part II: Sector studies
• Part III: Cross-sectoral perspectives
• Part IV: Policy implications
• Index