KaRMA2020

The project:

Poultry industry generates huge amounts of waste each year. Only in the European Union 13.1 million tons of poultry meat are produced for year, with an estimated generation of 3.1 million tons of feather waste. Due to the raise in poultry meat consumption in the EU countries, this amount is expected to increase in the following years.

In Europe, the majority of the poultry feather waste is disposed in landfills, incinerated, or a minor part converted into low nutritional value animal food, becoming a problematic for the future. At present, the conversion and the use of the feathers as raw material in industrial applications are still very limited. Therefore, the development of industrial conversion methods and exploitation strategies for poultry feathers will not only increase the value of feathers as raw material but also reduce environment impact and health hazards associated to landfill. In this context KaRMA2020 Project aims to the industrial manufacture and the exploitation of such underutilized feather waste for the production of valuable raw material that will be employed to develop products for cross-sectorial applications, such as hydrolysed keratin, bioplastics, flame retardant coatings, spun bonded non-wovens and thermoset biobased resins.

Partnership:

The KaRMA2020 project is supported by 16 partners of which 6 are industrial organizations (SADA, FKuR, AVT, SIOEN, Dlabs and FTIB), 8 research institutions (CID, VTT, IBWCh, SP, SPPR, CTB, AIM) and academia (CNRS) and 2 private consultants (VTG, CTech). The partners come from 9 different European countries (Spain, Finland, Sweden, Belgium, Poland, France, The Netherlands, Germany, and Italy) and Israel. The consortium makes up a strong team of organizations with exceptional expertise in each of the required technical areas (from feather reception to validation of keratin-based end products i.e. bioplastics, fertilizers, fibres, coating and thermosets, along with the know-how on techno-economic and environmental evaluation, exploitation strategies and dissemination activities (VTG, CTECH, SP).

Our role:

CIDETEC acts as coordinator of the project. Apart from this role, CIDETEC is in charge of several key technical tasks and activities, including:

Pre-treatment of feathers for further processing;

Formulation of feather-based bioplastics and

Manufacturing of bio-based composites