A Circular Bioeconomy is emerging motivated by a variety of sustainability challenges. The use of renewable resources to produce materials and energy vectors to meet massive Society consumption is an academic and industrial mandatory priority. Biomass valorization to added value biochemicals is rapidly emerging as the basis for future Chemical Industry. In this context, Biorefinery concept is used to define facilities in which biomass is converted through sustainable technologies into a wide range of added value bioproducts. One of the most abundant renewable resource is lignocellulosic biomass.
Wine production is one of the important agricultural activity in Mediterranean countries, including Portugal. It generates high quantity of wastes, being vineyard pruning waste (VPW) one of these wastes, with vine shoots disposed into vineyards or used for on-site combustion. VPW is a lignocellulosic resource with extreme rich chemical constituents, practically unexplored, which awakened our interest to evaluate the potential of its valorization in order to create value.
BioreVinery project, in the dual context of Circular Bioeconomy and Biorefinery concept, aims at producing bioproducts with added value through integrated VPW valorization. Taking advantage of complementary knowledge and facilities of Research Groups from REQUIMTE-LAQV at FCUP, ISEP, NOVA Lisboa,  research work is focused in development of advanced extraction technologies to obtain bioactive phenolic compounds and transform hemicellulose/cellulose/lignin into corresponding monomers; the biochar subproduct is used to prepare new (nano)catalysts for monomers catalytic transformation into platform molecules, to further upgrade to building blocks for biopolymers preparation, which ultimately is used to encapsulate bioactive phenolic compounds - Fig. 1. For this we rely on LAQV Teams to achieve the main goals of BioreVinery project:
To extract VPW components (from a Portuguese Wine Production Company): phenolic bioactive compounds and monomers, using sustainable and advanced extraction techniques using clean and green solvents;
To prepare new (nano)catalysts using biochar, by-product from extraction methodologies, as support for catalytic active functionalities;
To implement heterogeneous catalytic processes using biochar catalysts to produce: i) platform molecules and ii) corresponding building blocks for biopolymers preparation;
To produce biopolymers by several polymerizations technologies using green solvents and to in-situ encapsulate phenolic bioactive compounds using advanced and sustainable techniques;
To perform Life Cycle Assessment, Life Cycle Costing and cost/benefit analysis to biorefinery concept applied to VPW valorization.
BioreVinery project intends to contribute to potential technological knowledge valorization and to boost up Portuguese Bioeconomy in line with Societal Challenges.