Evaluation of the environmental benefits of an innovative fruit tray made of vegetal fibres

Feltwood’s Supermarket tray from a lettuce

Title

Evaluation of the environmental benefits of an innovative fruit tray made of vegetal fibres

Duration

9 March 2020 / 9 July 2020

VIDA Challenges

Resource-efficient food processing

Summary

Polution is one of the most relevant challenges that we must face nowadays. Among the main causes, we find the industrial materials containing toxics and being non-biodegradable. The cost of plastic pollution, only in Europe, will be 22,000 million euros up to 2030. Only 9% of the plastic manufactured worldwide gets recycled, the rest takes hundreds of years to degrade and, along the way, releases toxic substances harmful to the environment, animals and humans. 90% of the water we drink already contains microplastics, including bottled water.

Feltwood is a Spanish company that develops technologies to obtain industrial materials that may substitute plastics from vegetal waste. These materials are 100% free of toxic substances and use no plastic, adhesives or binders. Feltwood materials are 100% vegetal fibres which means that they are 100% biodegradable and compostable. Our technology also allows Feltwood materials to be easily recyclable without the need for newly added material. The aim of this action is to evaluate the environmental benefits of an innovative fruit tray made of vegetal fibres from Feltwood process. This will complement many other studies needed to assure the market feasibility of our products. This evaluation will identify the Carbon Footprint (Cradle to gate) of one of our final products and will contemplate the extraction, transportation and processing of raw materials and manufacturing.

This Project will allow us to go further on our knowledge of our process which final goal is to produce industrial materials able to outplace plastics in many different applications and do so by transforming vegetal waste from farmers and vegetable processors that are not suitable for human consumption. Some of these applications include supermarket trays for vegetables and fruit to be used for the same producers, closing the circular economy loop. Besides the above, our process produces a sub-product that is a remarkable fertilizer which also helps the food industry to save money on chemical fertilizers. We are confident that our technology will help companies around Europe to stop using plastics to produce their goods and turn to more sustainable materials. We also aim for the substitution of single-use plastics forbidden by the European Union from January 1st, 2021.

 

Feltwood’s Circular Economy