An ETH Domain Joint Initiative in the Strategic Area Energy, Climate & Sustainable Environment.

This webpage is dedicated to a Joint Initiative on Proteins. Proteins are one of the most abundant polymeric materials on Earth. The goal of this interdisciplinary project is to develop new sustainable functional soft-materials based on proteins.

Despite the nearly one billion people still undernourished, food waste accounts for roughly one third of total food production. The key idea of this Joint Initiative is to develop approaches that, starting from protein-rich waste streams (raw or pre-processed), create functional materials using minimal purification and processing procedures. A few demonstrative applications will be targeted over the three years of the programme to act as a springboard for a future large-scale initiative. Three pillars are identified as particularly significant, owing to their urgency and impact on a global scale. The first will be food packaging (that is responsible for ~40% of the total yearly plastic pollution); a second one will be porous materials for CO₂ capture (as an example of high value-added materials, and a way to further address the issue of the carbon footprint); a third one will be membranes for efficient water purification. By duly valorising protein-rich waste streams into sustainable technologies, the proposed research intends to enable a paradigm shift, effectively leading to a change of the sign of carbon footprint of food protein waste from positive to negative.

Participating Research Institutions: ETHZ, EPFL, EMPA, PSI, WSL, eawag

External partners: BluAct Technologies GmbH

Main contacts:
Raffaele Mezzenga: raffaele.mezzenga@hest.ethz.ch
Francesco Stellacci: francesco.stellacci@epfl.ch