On Tuesday 3 November at 12:30 (RiminiFiera (IT), Room Tiglio, Hall A6), NSBproject will present at Ecomondo 2026 in Rimini together with IST-ID / iBB.
The joint paper “Circular Bioplastics from Mediterranean Waste: High-Performance Polymers via Cascaded Biorefinery and Enzymatic Polycondensation” (L. Fonseca, R. Varotto, A. Jester) was selected through the Call for Papers for the international session “Technological solutions for resources recovery from end-of-life products and materials in the Mediterranean landscape”. The session is chaired by Fabrizio Passarini (Ecomondo Scientific Technical Committee, University of Bologna), Lucia Rigamonti (Politecnico di Milano) and ATIA–ISWA. The paper is one of 27 selected for oral presentation, in the “Plastics, bioplastics & textiles” track.
Within the project POLYMERS-5B, IST-ID has developed an enzyme-based cascading biorefinery that extracts several products from the same tomato and olive pomace stream:
- bioactives: lycopene from tomato pomace and hydroxytyrosol-rich polyphenols from olive pomace;
- pectin, with a pilot yield target of at least 17 kg per tonne of pomace;
- monomers for structural bio-based polyesters, already produced in reproducible pilot batches of up to 15 kg (TRL 5), with enzyme catalyst reuse.
The polyesters have a declared glass transition temperature of 80 °C, above the 70 °C of a commercial thermoset reference, and an elastic modulus of about 2 GPa. Stiffness is the next development target: commercial benchmarks for rigid bio-based materials range from 3.2 to 3.85 GPa.
NSB’s contribution is based on a C-Tech Navigator® Technology Positioning analysis. It looks beyond the project scope, at the biorefinery’s industrial future and the start-up concept. We mapped 9 industrial and research players across four technology families and screened 128 scientific works. The finding is clear: every target molecule is already on the market, and 8 of the 9 players already sell standardised grades. Yet none of them publishes manufacturing costs or biomass throughput. This is where a co-located, multi-product biorefinery can make a difference, with three advantages: verified delivered cost, traceable upcycled origin and security of supply.
The business case we consider most relevant for the Mediterranean agri-food sector is therefore on-site valorisation at the processing plant (tolling model):
- the biorefinery operates alongside a tomato processing facility, with zero transport cost for tomato pomace;
- olive pomace is sourced within a 25 km radius;
- tomato and olive campaigns cover only 5–6 months a year, so stored biomass or grape and orange residues keep the plant running all year round.
In this model, by-products that are currently a disposal cost become a source of value. Using conservative literature yields, one tonne of tomato pomace has a gross value potential of €294–633. For olive pomace the figure is €209–1,457, which is 5 to 36 times the Portuguese landfill tax of €40/t. The team’s processing-cost targets are below €294/t for tomato pomace and below €209/t for olive pomace, at the low end of these ranges. These are gross values and targets, which the pilot yields will firm up.
Our analysis also identifies where to enter first: markets whose regulatory route is already open. These include natural lycopene colour (E160d) for clean-label food and beverages, hydroxytyrosol actives for clean-beauty cosmetics, and upcycled low-methoxyl pectin for sugar-reduced fruit preparations.
In Rimini, we would like to discuss this model with by-product, sustainability and operations managers of Italian and Iberian agri-food groups processing more than 100,000 tonnes per year.
Contact: r.varotto@nsbproject.com