HORIZON-JU-CBE-2026-IAFlag-01 (IA Flagship): Boosting biorefinery competitiveness through biotech

Bondalti Water offers an industrial integration and deployment role to de-risk and scale biomanufacturing routes to full industrial scale (TRL 8), ensuring that the supporting process infrastructure—especially water, wastewater, utilities, and downstream integration constraints—does not limit competitiveness, availability, or sustainability. This directly supports the topic’s expected outcomes (industrial-scale biorefinery value chains, market-ready bio-based products, improved sustainability/circularity/resource efficiency, and EU resilience/competitiveness).

What we can contribute (work packages / tasks)

• Industrial integration of water and utility systems: design and optimisation of water/steam/cooling and wastewater interfaces to enable stable large-scale operation, addressing scale-up challenges such as operational stability, sterility constraints, and efficient integration of downstream operations.

• Circular water management and compliance-by-design: closed-loop water concepts, effluent minimisation and advanced treatment for complex biorefinery streams, aligned with the topic’s requirement to improve sustainability, circularity, and resource efficiency against benchmarks.

• Downstream and supporting unit operations integration: engineering support for integration of non-biotech unit operations (e.g., separations/purification side-stream handling, CIP compatibility, waste/residue management) that are explicitly in scope as supporting operations.

• Digital monitoring, analytics and performance verification: instrumentation strategies and data pipelines to evidence TRL8 performance (availability, yield/quality, stability), and to provide robust datasets for sustainability benchmarking and business-case validation.

• SSbD implementation support: contribution of operational and environmental data (water/energy/chemicals, waste streams, emissions) for the required task applying the EC Safe-and-Sustainable-by-Design (SSbD) framework to both the production process and the derived end-product(s).

• Regulatory and risk assessment support: practical input to compliance with EU regulatory frameworks, plus risk assessment and mitigation for impacts from biotechnology on human and ecosystem safety (with strong focus on aqueous pathways and receiving environments).

• Multi-actor value chain engagement: support to the required multi-actor approach by connecting technical requirements across feedstock providers (incl. residues/water sector actors where relevant), policymakers (permits/acceptance), and end users/off-takers.

Keywords / tags

Flagship biorefinery; industrial biotech; TRL 8; scale-up de-risking; utilities integration; circular water loops; advanced wastewater treatment; downstream integration; product quality verification; SSbD; regulatory compliance; risk assessment; digital monitoring; resource efficiency; competitiveness.