FREGATE : Flexible, Resilient, EGalitarian and Adapted environmental biorefining systems for urban TErritories

Context and challenges

Among the numerous challenges that cities have to face, the management of biowaste appears to be more and more crucial. As a matter of fact, the AGEC law provides a generalized separate collection of biowaste all over France for any biowaste producer from December 31st 2023. In 2020 however, only 175 french communities separately collected their biowaste (whether household or professional), representing only 6% of the french population. It is likely that numerous cities will not be able to implement biowaste collection and valorization systems by 2024. The regulatory obligation on biowaste valorization as well as food and energy transition issues confirm the urgency of an in-depth reflection on the best organization procedures of biowaste valorization, including both circularity and adaptation to the territory. In this context, the concept of urban environmental biorefinery deserves scientific investigation. 

Objectives

The topic of urban environmental biorefinery is fairly new and original, with very few scientific papers on the subject (9 Web Of Science references respond to « urban biorefinery » in the search field,  2 within the 2015-2016 period and 7 during 2019-2021).

The goal of the FREGATE project is to answer the question: How to implement flexible, resilient and urban-territory-adapted environmental biorefining solutions? 

FREGATE will address 3 strongly interrelated research questions:

• How to co-construct a tailored design of an Urban Environmental Biorefining System (UEBS) for  its territory and its needs?
• In what extend the UEBS’ flexibility/modularity changes the constraints of the tailored design?
• In what extend the framework of resilience changes the constraints of the tailored design?

Contact - Coordination :

INRAE and non-INRAE partners