GreenProtein demonstration plant is ready and operative
Type of post: NEWS.
After 3 years of project development, the GreenProtein demonstration plant is
ready and operative. This BBI JU project is aimed at producing high-added
value, food-grade and fully functional proteins and other ingredients, out of
vegetal residues (mainly, from sugar beet).
Press release: “GreenProtein General Assembly &
DEMO Plant Part 2”,
30/10/2019.
Figure 1. GreenProtein demo plant
The project general assembly and the opening of
the demo plant took place the 9th and 10th of October 2019. These were two
significant events for the project and a big occasion to celebrate and share the
progress. The host of the events was Royal
Cosun, project coordinator.
The main outcome of GreenProtein will be the transformation
of 4,000 tons of agricultural residue yearly into a high-quality dried RuBisCO
powder ready to enter into food industry production chains as an alternative of
the widely extended egg white preparations or whey protein. One important
milestone in this process was the design and inplementation of specific
equipment to establish a demonstration plant with capacity of 1,500 kg/hour of
vegetable residue input, rendering 28 kg of dry RuBisCO. The GreenProtein demo
plant has been built with a compact design, ready to be “plugged” to the
production line, and so it is an easily replicable system with a high spreading
projection in whole EU.
Ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase oxygenase,
most commonly known by the shorter name RuBisCO, is an enzyme that catalyses
the first major step of carbon fixation, a process by which atmospheric carbon
dioxide and water are converted to energy-rich molecules such as glucose, using
sunlight. In green parts of plants, the protein RuBisCO can make up to 50% of
the total amount of the protein fraction. Thereby, RuBisCO is the key
photosynthetic enzyme in green leaves of plants and is considered the most
abundant protein present on earth. It is of potential interest for human consumption due to its high nutritional value. It contains high amounts of essential amino acids, which makes it rather unique among vegetable proteins.
