Crops grown on contaminated land co… – Information Centre – Research & Innovation

By 2050, the worldwide bioeconomy will require up to 24 billion tonnes of biomass, but the sector should overcome substantial hurdles to reach its entire potential. These include things like a deficiency of farmer self confidence in the industry for biomass, a deficiency of supply of biomass to the market and the will need to be certain that land for biomass crops does not contend with land employed for food stuff production.

The GRACE task, funded by the Bio-dependent Industries Joint Undertaking (BBI JU), a public-non-public partnership in between the EU and the market, is advancing the bioeconomy by bringing together 22 gamers from the agriculture sector, bioindustry and scientists. They are demonstrating the big-scale production of novel miscanthus hybrid crops and hemp crop kinds on marginal and contaminated land as perfectly as the use of the biomass in producing a broad range of products and solutions.

‘There are millions of hectares of marginal and contaminated land in Europe which could be employed to present feedstock for the bioeconomy without competing with food stuff production and at the very same time contribute in the direction of revitalising rural economies,’ suggests Moritz Wagner, GRACE task manager and a researcher at the College of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany. ‘GRACE will show that bio-dependent value chains can contribute to weather-modify mitigation by replacing carbon-intense fossil-dependent products and solutions with biobased products and solutions with very low CO2 emissions.’

Hemp and miscanthus

The task is concentrating on two multipurpose crops – miscanthus and hemp. These can be employed in a broad range of applications central to the bioeconomy like essential chemical substances, biofuels, bio-dependent building materials, composites and pharmaceuticals.

Venture scientists have already formulated a new form of miscanthus crop that can be developed from seed. Formerly, miscanthus was planted utilizing rhizomes a pricey planting technique. The new kinds are developed to be of a greater excellent, to be cold- and drought-resistant and to have very similar yields to the conventional miscanthus crop. Researchers are also studying the impacts of growing miscanthus on land polluted by weighty metals to see the extent to which the pollutants are taken up by the crops.

GRACE’s miscanthus crops can be employed in building insulation, light-weight concrete – or concrete not employed for load-bearing reasons – bioplastics, bioethanol, chemical substances and solvents employed in industrial procedures and buyer products and solutions, in textiles, vehicles and electronics and in composite fibres.

The task has already shown bioethanol production from miscanthus straw at a pre-industrial bioethanol refinery in Straubing, Germany. It is also working on utilizing the extracted lignocellulosic sugars from miscanthus straw to develop biochemicals for earning bioplastics.

A use for by-products and solutions

The GRACE task is also checking out how to use by-products and solutions – for illustration, the production of light-weight concrete utilizing milled miscanthus, and miscanthus dust, which can be employed in paper production. One particular task companion is pursuing this utilizing miscanthus crops developed on unused land at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam.

Meanwhile, GRACE’s scientists have properly employed distinctive factors of hemp biomass like cannabidiol, a non-psychotropic cannabinoid, which is beneath advancement for the procedure of epilepsy.

The task has set up more than sixty hectares of miscanthus and hemp on contaminated and deserted land. GRACE scientists hope to prolong the project’s momentum beyond its formal endpoint by means of its ‘industry panel’, which connects distinctive sectors of the bioindustry to lecturers working in the area of biomass.

This task was funded by BBI JU, a EUR 3.7-billion public-non-public partnership in between the EU and the Bio-dependent Industries Consortium (BIC).