Country: EU Countries
Sector(s): Agriculture and rural development
Date: 11/2016 - 05/2020
Client / Beneficiary: Research Executive Agency (REA), under the power delegated by the European Commission
Financing Agency: Horizon 2020 Financial Instrument
Project Value: 6,385,661 €
The main goal of AGROinLOG is the demonstration of Integrated Biomass Logistic Centres (IBLC) for food and non-food products, evaluating their technical, environmental and economic feasibility. The project is based on three agro-industries in the fodder (Spain), olive oil production (Greece) and cereal processing (Sweden) sectors that are willing to deploy new business lines in their facilities to open new markets in bio-commodities (energy, transport and manufacturing purposes) and intermediate bio-products (transport and biochemicals). These sectors represent over 10% turnover of agro-food industries and 30% of those with inherent synergies to integrate food and non-food business taking advantage of their existing equipment, seasonality and established food logistics. The synergies of
applying IBLCs business in existing agro-industries can have a positive impact over 18% in final product price, giving a clear competitive strength to a wide segment of agro-industries, which can exploit this privileged situation compared to a new biomass supply business built from scratch.
More specifically the project aims to:
The project is built on these agro-industries that will achieve a TRL7-8 in their facilities, guaranteeing operation under real conditions and with big amounts of production compared to the current activity, ensuring proximity to real market at the end of the project. Main challenges are based on being able to integrate logistics, harvesting and equipment in food and non-food applications, where the project is focused; ensuring marketability of the final bio-commodities. Besides, AGROinLOG will apply a multi-actor approach to attain experiences and knowledge of the sectors and agro- industries, enhancing the accuracy of the business models and developing effective and friendly guidelines of best practices to replicate and spread IBLC concept in Europe. This project will contribute towards employment stability – seasonality avoidance-, rural development and bio-economy goals.
The results of the project are:
Although biomass production and utilization itself brings positive impacts to the society and the bio-economy, AGROinLOG impacts assessment goes beyond these general impacts in order to be specifically focused on those achieved through the consideration of IBLCs aspects.
The positive aspects of the possible synergies that the incorporation of a new non-food based business can bring to an existing food based agro-industry are depicted as follows:
Synergy effects of implementing new IBLCs in respect to: Biomass sourcing, Investments, Inventorying and labeling (information processing), marketing, harvesting, transport, storage and treating/processing.
The technical, economic and environmental direct impacts of the three agro-industries in which IBLCs will be implemented, have been estimated on the base of several indicators for each of them. More analytically, AGROinLOG contributes to the following:
The services provided are:
