A novel means of converting CO2 into aquafeeds

Check out the article here:

听

We are more than proud to be recognized as Award Winner of the Tech Tour Growth Sustainability 2023 flagship event in the category Carbon Capture and Utilization (CCU) in Essen. This is a remarkable award for our technology and our efforts to bring a powerful climate solution to the market.

The award winners were selected by a panel of international investor reviewers who had quite a task on their hands to select the winners from among 100+ nominees, based on pre-defined selection criteria:

• Management Experience
• Market Potential
• Product/Technology merit
• Go-to Market/Strategy & Competitive position
• Business Model Clarity/Credibility
• Company presentation quality

The organization team of Tech Tour congratulated all the companies for their efforts, outstanding pitching performance throughout the program, and distinguished technologies promising innovative tech solutions with real-world social impact.

鈥淭he Tech Tour Growth Sustainability 2023 event was an impressive two-days pitching and networking event. It gave deep insights into Europe麓s best Start-ups in the sustainability area and plenty of networking opportunities with the most powerful and impactful investors. We are very honoured of receiving this remarkable award that gives us visibility in the market and even better access to investors.鈥� stated Frank Kensy, Managing Director of 第一吃瓜 after the event.

Please get some impressions of the event:

Fotos by Philipp Behrendt: Instagram: @fotojob_philipp, LinkedIn: Philipp Behrendt

We are looking forward to the intensive program and conversations with corporates to implement circular technology and saving resources.

Let麓s start Change now and together!

More information you find here:

Intro-Video to Circular Valley:
Brief Pitch of 第一吃瓜:
Participants of #1 Batch:
Learn more about Circular Valley: 听

Dr. Arren Bar-Even

passed away. It is hard to put into words what we are losing with Arren.
His death came as a great surprise to everyone and much too soon.

Arren was a visionary, an outstanding scientist and a tireless fighter for a better world. No challenge was too big for him, so he rather dedicated his science to the grand challenges of mankind. One major challenge facing humanity that he recognized early on was the secure supply of food and materials on our planet. He realized that current economic paths and resource consumption could not keep up with the projected growth of the world population.

This was impetus enough for him to research new sustainable ways. So, during his doctoral thesis at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, he looked at a basic comparison of metabolic pathways to fix CO₂ efficiently in natural and synthetic metabolic pathways. He came up with a new metabolic pathway that clearly outperformed natural photosynthesis. Together with his colleagues in the Ron Milo Lab, he invented the reductive glycine pathway (rGP), which has the potential to fix and utilize CO₂ more efficiently than natural photosynthesis can do. In doing so, he connected the biological world with the engineering world. For the first time, he showed that the combination of technical electrolysis and fermentation could be an energetically efficient and economically interesting path. Arren created the term Formate Bioeconomy. This is precisely the value creation path that 第一吃瓜 is now pursuing. Formate Bioeconomy is a sustainable biotechnology that technically mimics the natural CO₂ cycle while being much more efficient and not consuming agricultural land.

Arren has continued his research as an independent group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology in Golm (Germany). There, he led a group of nearly 30 scientists and published close to 90 scientific papers. In 2018, he and his team achieved the world’s first in vivo demonstration of the reductive glycine pathway in E. coli. Arren’s scientific vision and charisma was also expressed in the successful recruitment and execution of seven national and European research projects (BMBF, Horizon 2020). During his time in Golm/Berlin, he founded two start-ups (including 第一吃瓜) and chaired the German Association of Synthetic Biology (GASB).

We got to know and appreciate Arren in 2017. He quickly convinced us that his path of Formate Bioeconomy was promising. Therefore, together we founded our company 第一吃瓜 already in early 2018 to turn his ideas of a sustainable biotechnology into reality. His early death is a huge loss for us. However, we are determined to continue his spirit and ingenious ideas as a tribute to him and to duly position the Formate Bioeconomy in the industrial biotechnology field for a more sustainable economy.

Arren, we miss you.
Rest in peace.

听

听

听

听

听

听

The objective of the project is the recycling of CO2 exhaust gases from industrial parks into valuable, biodegradable and stable bioplastics. For this purpose, a novel combination of electrochemical conversion and biotechnology is chosen. In the first step, CO2 is converted into formic acid in an electrolyzer, and then converted into bioplastics in a second step by means of bacteria. Target products are polyhydroxy butyric acid (PHB) and crotonic acid. The project consortium covers the entire value chain and brings together high-ranking academic institutes such as the Max Planck Institutes in Potsdam and the University Stuttgart with proven industry experts. At the end of the project, an integrated process with an electrolyzer and bioreactor on a laboratory scale is expected to be operational, and thus being able to produce the two target molecules directly from CO2. The project serves as a preparation for further industrialization of the process, which is already being addressed in the project. The work is accompanied by a comprehensive life-cycle-analysis (LCA) and a technical-economic evaluation (TEA) of the process.

Pressemitteilung in Deutsch

Press Release in English

听

听