EUBCE 2024 - Nils RETTENMAIER - Unconventional Product Applications: Big but Often Neglected Levers for Sustainability and Success

Unconventional Product Applications: Big but Often Neglected Levers for Sustainability and Success

Short Introductive summary

Technology development often focusses on highly optimising a particular process to produce a bio-based product resembling a fossil-based product as closely as possible. Some unconventional applications can instead take advantage of e.g. a more complex composition of a bio-based product. This can e.g. be the case for multifunctional additives and ingredients for feed, food and cosmetics or some lignin-based products. We developed and present a co-creation approach to sustainability assessment accompanying technology development projects that can help to identify such applications. It proved useful to connect knowledge of experts in their respective fields from academia and applied sciences with needs of industry partners to novel value chains. Levers for sustainability and success resulting from adding or increasing product benefits this way and thus replacing more resource and energy intensive conventional products are in many cases bigger than levers provided by a more rigorous process optimization. Co-creation approaches that can provide such advantages should be considered in particular in heterogeneous project consortia to facilitate collaborative focus on products.

H. Keller, IFEU - Institute for Energy and Environmental Research Heidelberg, Heidelberg, GERMANY
N. Rettenmaier, IFEU - Institute for Energy and Environmental Research Heidelberg, Heidelberg, GERMANY