Sugar beet pulp is by far the largest byproduct of vegetable processing waste in the EU. Each year, 57 million tonnes of it is produced by industry, around the same weight as 304, 812 Boeing 747s.
Most of us are familiar with beetroots we find in supermarkets, yet consumers are less acquainted with the sugar beet – a variety of the same species, primarily used to make sugar. It is Europe’s alternative to tropical sugar cane.
However, food and beverages do not exhaust the applications for this chemically blessed crop. One Polish designer has come up with ways of taking on the huge waste piles generated by the industry.
Beet boxing
The Polish design team Waste Lab has developed a low-tech method for turning the waste leaves and pulp of beets into biodegradable packaging applications such as supermarket fruit containers, plant pots, and packaging. The team is led by Sonia Maria Jaskiewicz, a graduate of the department of bio-design in Poznań School of Form.
Waste Lab’s process for making beet biomaterials came into being around after Sonia began experimenting with how to produce a cost-effective, sustainably sourced, and biodegradable material.
In deciding to work with beet, Sonia took inspiration from the waste pools around her. Poland is one of the most competitive sugar beet producing areas in Europe, along with northern France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium, places where the climate is cold enough to grow the crop reliably.
Waste Lab uses technology similar to those used in plastic production to create its beet waste-based goods. The leaves are made into a pulp that is then blended with natural material, resulting in a new composite that has the right properties for plates and packaging. Hot press technology is used to compress the fibres and mould it into shape. In 2022, its beet biomaterial won the ‘Future Thinking’ category of a design award by Distributed Design for its innovative work.
Beyond renewables
The beet waste material produced by Waste Lab’s philosophy embodies many of the ideals that the studio would like to see implemented in the actual design of the economy at large.
For Waste Lab and Sonia Jaskiewicz, our economy is out of kilter with its physical and natural underpinnings. We use more materials than we need to begin with and then poison the environment by dumping them after their short product lives.
In this context, the studio believes, switching from the over-exploitation of fossil raw materials to the overexploitation of natural renewable materials will not be enough to solve the problem of climate change and environmental degradation.
Why circular?
Their solution is simple, though difficult to implement. First, the economy must prioritise the use of renewable raw materials where possible while also using up material byproducts, which would cover any waste streams from the manufacturing process as well as products that consumers no longer need.
Using waste streams is key to their vision of a sustainable economy. Endlessly extracting from biological organisms, just like the endless extraction of fossil fuels, is not tenable on a planet with limits. Circularity meanwhile, where all waste becomes inputs for another manufacturing process, takes us much closer to an economy capable of staying within the planet’s physical carrying capacity.
Why biodegradable?
Second in Waste Lab’s vision of a sustainable economy is product biodegradability. Very often, renewable and circular materials will also be materials that degrade within reasonable time in natural environments.
However, this is not always the case. For example, some bioplastics originally made from plant matter are indistinguishable chemically from oil plastics, resulting in a recyclable (circular) yet non-biodegradable product.
While most mainstream definitions of good product design centre ‘durability’ as the mark of high-performance, we may have to shelve the notion that goods should be built to last forever. Instead of durability, functionality and a lifespan that is appropriate for the current use of a product should be factored in.
“Consumption of those type of products is huge and constantly growing… most of them are used only ONCE. How come we still use so durable material as plastic for short-live food??” asked Sonia in an interview.
Why local?
There is a final part of the Waste Lab design philosophy. According to Waste Lab, raw materials should, where possible, be sourced locally. Exploring the material potential of sugar beet pulp and beet leaves is part of using up the waste outputs that Europe is already producing.
“By the project we want to make a statement, and raise awareness of the fact that many everyday disposable items are made from durable and imported materials,” Sonia has stated,
Under a circular economy, it is likely that regions and countries will still rely on overseas imports to obtain their renewable feedstock. Although the raw materials of a circular, renewable economy would be far more evenly distributed around the world than those of a fossil economy, certain highly scalable feedstocks will be more available in agriculturally active countries for example.
Yet circularity does lend itself to more localised supply chains and can ease reliance on imports, offering resilience for local populations when longer trade routes are disrupted.
EU works with Dutch processor on beet chemicals
There are more uses of beet waste than as a plastic packaging replacement. It also has a multitude of biochemicals inside its leaves and non-edible parts.
These humble root vegetables offer sources of natural fertiliser, animal feed, molasses for baking and beverages, and a potentially low-environmental impact source of sugars for the food, drink, and pharma industries.
In recognition of its potential, the EU funded PULP2VALUE, a bioeconomy project between 2015 and 2019 under the Bio-Based Industries Joint Undertaking (BBIJU) dedicated to exploiting sugar beet pulp for high value chemicals.
Beet sugar factories produce a steady stream of waste beet pulp but the organic sludge currently has few scaled uses. To rectify this, PULP2VALUE aimed to scale and integrate the production of microcellulose fibres, arabinose, and galacturonic acid from this abundant waste as well as to build out a secure, complete value chain for these products.
The project showcased the sheer diversity of beet pulp’s high-end chemical applications. Microcellulose fibres are versatile additives used in detergents, in the oil and gas industry, as well as in paints and coatings and in composite materials. Arabinose is a chemical used in the flavour and food markets while galacturonic acid is a personal care and chemical industry stalwart.
With these diverse end use applications driving the project, In 2020, the EU’s BBJU eventually awarded the Pulp2Value project with the prize for having the highest number of cross-sector interconnections.
The results
The project centred round the Dutch company Royal Cousun, a leading European sugar beet processor, who was able to develop different extraction techniques to isolate these products from sugar beet pulp.
Its experiments in PULP2VALUE indicated that making microcellulose could only be economic under a full-scale cascade biorefinery system – a biorefinery plant where arabinose and galacturonic acid also were being manufactured simultaneously. The company was able to demonstrate a cost-effective system along these lines.
So far, Royal Cosun has not managed to commercially scale its project demo refinery for these three chemicals. This isn’t to say its biobased ambitions have come to a halt. Royal Cosun is among the European beet processors most active in applying its wastestreams and expertise in order to branch out into biobased chemicals.
The beet company’s biobased portfolio currently contains two basic ingredients: BetaBind, a chemical additive that regulates moisture in powders and tablets, and Quatin, a key ingredient inside fabric softeners and hair conditioners, which neutralises negative charges on surfaces. In 2022, Royal Cosun was awarded a €3 million subsidy to construct a biorefinery in Delfzijl capable of converting beet pulp, taken from Cosun’s sugar factory in Vierverlaten, into these two products.
A successful circular and biobased supply chain relies on a reliable flow of cheap and abundant feedstock meaning that the raw materials of any sustainable economy will differ from region to region.
Beet waste is a good example of how Europe can use what’s already around them to achieve self-sufficiency sustainably without imports or additional crop cultivation. As both Waste Lab and Royal Cosun’s beet-based experiments show, a circular and renewable economy could encourage Europe to tap already abundant yet under-valued sources of new materials.
