Case Studies

Scotland's dairy industry generates approximately 25,000 tonnes of salt whey annually. Together, Take Root Bio and Heriot-Watt University's International Centre for Brewing and Distilling aimed to develop a waste valorisation pathway for salt whey.

Sustainable Extricko, working with Dr Joanna Sadler, Senior Lecturer in Biotechnology, School of Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh, has developed a low cost and sustainable process for producing high value molecules from end of life composite materials like carbon and glass fibre. With support from UKRI Innovate UK Launchpad funding and IBioIC’s FlexBIO facility, the partners demonstrated the viability of recovering vanillin and protocatechuic acid, opening a route to circular economy manufacturing at scale.

With funding from Innovate UK’s Launchpad programme and support from IBioIC as the cluster management organisation, SilviBio Limited turned undervalued British wool into a patent pending raw material for peat-free growing media.

With funding from Innovate UK’s Launchpad programme and support from IBioIC as the Cluster Management Organisation, Mercel has proved their seaweed-based binder for laundry sheets, securing an exclusive contract for this technology. They have also opened discussions about related products from around the world.

Research groups at the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde are developing treatments for seed potatoes that rely on the use of bacteriocins, non-conventional protein antibiotics that show strong narrow spectrum killing activity against related bacterial species.  They have developed a discovery and testing pipeline for bacteriocins with potential for application in a potato treatment

The University of Glasgow proposed a spin-out, Casdu, to exploit this pipeline to develop, produce (or licence the production of) bacteriocin-based prophylactic treatment(s)

This successful project has advanced Ureaka’s ambitions to reduce carbon emissions of cement and concrete production while permanently storing CO2 towards commercialisation.