Job title: PhD student
Department: Green chemistry and technology
Occupancy rate: 100%
Type contract: limited duration
Closing date: 15/02/2022
Diploma: master in environmental engineering, bioscience engineering or similar
We welcome applications for a full-time PhD position within the Research Group Sustainable Systems Engineering (STEN) of the Department of Green Chemistry and Technology, Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, UGent. The PhD student will be appointed in a fellowship position on the project "CIRCULAR FOODPACK”.
A short summary of the CIRCULAR FOODPACK project:
CIRCULAR FOODPACK is an EU HORIZON 2020 project, coordinated by Fraunhofer-Gesellschafts in Germany, and aims to facilitate the circular use of plastic food packaging. This sector contains 87% of all European flexible plastic-plastic multilayer composites (MLC) due to the high requirements for food preservation and safety. However, these MLC laminates cannot be recycled by state of the art processes and thus counteract the circular use of food packaging. We will demonstrate the project results by production of high-quality recycled PE at TRL 5-6, using Sensor-Based-Specification or Tracer-Based-Sorting (TBS, SBS), deinking and thermally assisted deodorization as well as solvent-based or mechanical recycling processes. Innovative designs of recyclable and food-safe mono-material laminates will enable the re-use in high-value film applications, with upcoming food packaging marking with deinkable tracers. This allows a future circular economy of food packaging, if TBS guarantees a sorting of food grade materials. Product characterization, food contact compliance testing, LCA, LCC and business modelling will support and guide process development, upscale and design new packaging.
Your tasks will mainly be connected to WP7 which focuses on the selection and quantification of new value chains and their products which will be compared to baseline treatment scenarios (open loop recycling or incineration) and reference packaging. The scenarios for comparison will be defined in close collaboration with the technology and packaging developers. Also, consistent process flow schemes of the full value chain in the defined scenarios has to be set up, including collection, sorting, pre-treatment, recycling, manufacturing of the new packaging, use of the packaging for food or personal care products, and finally the end-of-life treatment of the packaging. Mass and energy balances have to be obtained in close collaboration with the involved partners, starting with the preliminary data collection (for hotspot analysis in function of intermediate feedback) that will be refined further on in the project. Key challenges will be to obtain mass and energy balances being representative at full scale in the final analysis and to obtain inventories at life cycle level. With respect to the latter level, information obtained from the partners will be coupled into existing life cycle inventory databases. Furthermore, a tailor-made Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) framework for CIRCULAR FoodPack will be developed starting from the UNEP-SETAC LCSA framework and other existing comprehensive sustainability frameworks (e.g. H2020 REPAIR) and making advantage of knowledge acquisition in relevant running projects. The CIRCULAR FoodPack framework will consider environmental impacts through Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), economic impacts through Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and social impacts through Social LCA (s-LCA), as well as circularity aspects,
food waste and compliance to health and safety legislation.
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