Scaling up sustainable and biodegradable materials is crucial for the future advancement of European industry. Currently, many bio-based alternatives struggle to compete with established fossil-based chemicals due to challenges in environmental, economic, and societal performance. To overcome this, the NEXT-STEP project aims to scale up and demonstrate a sustainable, safe, and economically viable production process for a new chemical platform, the 3-methyl-d-valerolactone (3MdVL) that will improve the sustainability and recyclability of polyurethane (PU) products and unlock new engineering plastic applications for polylactic acid (PLA) co-polymers. This initiative seeks to address environmental concerns while fostering the adoption of bio-based materials in various industries.
As partner of this research project, Certech is in charge of the following tasks:
• Supporting the upscaling of production by characterising lab and pilot samples of 3MdVL, its precursor as well as its hydrogenation product.
• Contributing to a safe and sustainable by design (SSbD) approach through safety assessment (risk analysis, air quality analysis and implementation of practical solutions at industrial scale).
• Processing and characterizing the target PLA co-polymers and foamed non-isocyanate PU (NIPU) derived from 3MdVL, in order to benchmark these with existing products on the market.
• Investigating various chemical recycling technologies for the new polymers, in order to validate these in terms of energetic cost and efficiency of the process (conversion degree).