After nine months of intensive work to kick-start the activities necessary for the validation of the BIOrescue biorefinery process, project partners met on 19 and 20 June 2017 in Monaghan, Ireland, to share their first results and plan the next steps. The meeting was an opportunity for project partners to assess the progress on the validation each step of the biorefinery process and to make sure that the solutions developed within this new concept will be sustainable, both environmentally and economically. To this end, the first exploitation workshop of the project was held on 20 June, with the help of the experts from C-Tech, to determine the marketable results to be produced within the project and select suitable routes for their exploitation.

Within these first nine months, a wide variety of feedstocks has already been analysed by Celignis, and a first range of tests have been carried out at CENER on mushroom compost thermochemical pretreatment. Furthermore, different extraction processes have been tested and the first steps towards the optimisation of the enzymatic solution to be used to process pretreated mushroom compost have been initiated.

As the meeting was held at the premises of the project technical coordinator, Monaghan Mushrooms, project partners were offered the chance to visit the compost yard where mushroom compost is prepared step by step with a mixture of straw, poultry, gypsum, ammonium sulphate and spawn, as well as the mushroom farm of Tyholland where mushrooms are grown with the compost from the nearby yard.

Within the next months, BIOrescue will celebrate its first year and deliver its first results on the compositional analysis of biomass feedstocks and on the extraction of valuable components from mushroom compost. Additionally, project partners will report officially on the preliminary results of the pretreatment and enzymatic hydrolysis processes and present the procedure for the production of biodegradable nanocarriers from mushroom compost.