Steps forward for new materials from bird feathers

15 February 2024, 20:38

The Processum Biorefinery Cluster is currently making exciting new progress on the UNLOCK project to extract keratin from bird feathers and demonstrate it on a pre-commercial scale. In collaboration with Sekab, large-scale tests were recently conducted in Sekab's Biorefinery Demo Plant (BDP) at the High Coast Innovation Park, to verify how the processing of feathers works in continuous operation. An important piece of the puzzle in the work to commercialize the process.

Every year, 15 million tons of meat are produced in Europe, creating 3.6 million tons of waste feathers annually. Only 25 procent of these feathers are collected and processed. In line with the EU's bioeconomy strategy, the UNLOCK project is working on valuing this waste stream and designing a new economically and environmentally sustainable value chain.

In the project, the Processum Biorefinery Cluster has optimized the process in the 40-litre batch reactor for thermochemical conversion.

-With the run in Sekab's demonstration plant, we have been able to verify that the process works on a large scale, where we have managed to treat 20 kg of feathers per hour around the clock. In the long term, this may lead to other actors building commercial facilities to handle spring waste in a sustainable way around Europe," says Jonna Almqvist, research and development engineer at RISE.

Although the properties of springs are significantly different from wood chips and other lignocellulosic materials, the primary feedstock run in the demonstration plant, operators were able to optimize the process to operate stably over time.

-"It is of course great that we have been able to show that the process works in our demonstration plant and that the initiative can move on to the commercialisation of new sustainable products and value chains from unused residual streams," says Anna Svedberg, Head of Innovation at Sekab. Our plant in Örnsköldsvik has been developed to pretreat lignocellulose into a sugar stream for further fermentation into ethanol, linked to our pretreatment technology CelluApp. The plant is unique in its kind through its flexibility and where unit operations such as negotiation, hydrolysis, fermentation, evaporation and distillation in demonstration scale (TRL 7-8) can also be utilised for other processes and raw materials.

The material produced and processed by RISE is now being passed on to partners in the UNLOCK project for use as a source of keratin in various agricultural products, such as the plug board, geotextiles, ground cloths and hydroponic foams. The focus going forward in the project is to optimise these, with the goal of creating biodegradable products that can replace today's fossil-based ones.

Read about the UNLOCK project here.