CARBAFIN: bitop and Sugar Beet

Dortmund, 29.05.2019: White sugar, table sugar or—nerdy—sucrose is at the centre of the EU project “CARBAFIN”. The EU is the world’s leading producer of sugar from sugar beet. Due to societal changes and changes in market regulations the European sugar beet industry faces big challenges. 145,000 sugar beet farmers in 20 EU member states and approximately 28,000 jobs in the direct processing of sugar beets alone are at risk. These changes led to an annual sugar beet surplus of at least 300,000 t and the goal of CARBAFIN is to use this very surplus by putting the sugar to use in new value chains in a bio-based economy. Since CARBAFIN is an EU project, partners are located in different EU countries, one even from Switzerland:

• acib GmbH, Austria

• Graz University of Technology, Austria

• Pfeifer & Langen GmbH & Co. KG, Germany

• AVA Biochem BSL AG, Switzerland

• Ghent University, Belgium

• bitop AG, Germany

• Galab Laboratories GmbH, Germany

• PNO Consultants BV, Netherlands

The project receives total funds of 5.3 million € and we at bitop are using funds for the development of the Glycoin^® process and for the production of Glycoin^®.

The Glycoin^® Sugar Connection

Chemically, Glycoin^® is a quite simple molecule which can be viewed as a simple combination of dextrose (nerdy: glucose) and glycerol. Unfortunately, production is not as simple, because mixing glucose and glycerol is by far not enough to start a reaction towards Glycoin^®. For reasons too complicated for such a news, bitop requires sucrose as the raw material, a molecule composed of glucose and fruit sugar (nerdy: fructose). The cleavage of the bond between the two sugars is what drives the reaction to bind glycerol to glucose—at the right spot! Within the framework of CARBAFIN, the focus lies on the Glycoin ^® production at industrial scale as an example for the already mentioned “new value chains” to show that the raw material sucrose can be used to produce the value product Glycoin^®. bitop received funding for a lab-scale purification unit for improving the Glycoin^® process. Furthermore, the full Glycoin^® process will be assessed and analysed ecologically and economically by LCA experts from Graz University of Technology.

New Developments

The project started in 2018 and will end in 2021 and within this timeframe you can expect further news from bitop and the other members of the consortium.