The CIRCLE Flagship project proudly celebrates its first anniversary, marking twelve months of pioneering work in industrial scale biorefinery retrofitting and circular biobased chemical production.

Launched on 1 September 2024, CIRCLE has already delivered a suite of technical, scientific and outreach milestones that position it at the forefront of Europe’s circular bioeconomy.

Key achievements over the past year

During its first year, CIRCLE successfully completed the Front End Engineering Design for the flagship facility. Additionally, TripleW, in collaboration with Sulzer, produced the world’s first food waste-based PLA bioplastic from TripleW’s lactic acid stream. The resulting PLA was used to make a cosmetic packaging prototype by Sulapac. This exciting milestone was reached significantly ahead of schedule under WP6 and is a critical step in establishing a fully integrated value chain for the production of biochemicals from food waste.  All active WPs have made great progress and on time submission of every planned deliverable was achieved.

About CIRCLE

CIRCLE (Circular Initiative for Recycling and waste Conversion into Lactate Extracts) is a four-year Innovation Action (1 September 2024 – 31 August 2028) funded by the Circular Biobased Europe Joint Undertaking under Horizon Europe (HORIZON-JU-CBE-2023-IAFlag-02). The project aims to retrofit an existing biogas plant into an industrial scale biorefinery, transforming food waste streams into high value biobased chemicals—lactic acid and PLA—while maximizing resource and energy efficiency. CIRCLE brings together 16 organisations from academia, SMEs and industry across Europe and Israel, under coordination by TripleW Ltd.