The valorisation of industrial waste streams in added value chemicals is an ambitious and long cherished objective for the transition to a circular economy. In VIALACTEA, we put forward the lactic acid (LA) platform concept, a biorefinery scheme revolving around lactic acid. Lactic acid constitutes an extraordinary platform chemical as, unlike in the carboxylate platform biorefinery, it can be selectively produced cost effectively from waste in undefined mixed culture fermentations avoiding use of resources competing with food. Among the possible lactic acid application, MCCA are attracting the attention of researchers and industry and is the targeted product in VIALACTEA to showcase the LA platform.

The project VIALACTEA tackles this challenge with an innovate methodology following the rationale of the retrosynthetic product design, which places the product specifications as starting point and advocates to design processes backwards starting from the requirements of the outcome of the process. In this way, VIALACTEA will focus first on the design of chain elongation processes to meet the requirements of the targeted MCCA. In turn, these requirements will dictate the composition that must be achieved in the lactic acid fermentation, i.e. the first process of the LA platform concept.

Ultimately VIALACTEA aims at taking a leap forward in the valorisation of wastes into added-value products by accelerating the development of the LA platform, a novel and promising biorefinery scheme.