Agricultural residues and by-products are often underutilized and considered waste rather than valuable resources. By recognizing their potential, a biorefinery approach can be adopted to produce high value-added products. Beer production is a process within the food and beverage industry that holds immense potential for reusing its residues. In Europe alone, more than 30 billion liters of beer are produced annually, generating around 6 to 7 billion tons of by-products and waste streams, including brewers’ spent grains (BSG), spent yeast, wastewater and CO₂ from fermentation.

Horizon Europe’s CHEERS project uses these residues and by-products to create five innovative bio-based products: insect protein powder, single cell protein, volatile fatty acids, chlorine and ectoin. Insect protein is produced by feeding brewer’s spent grains to mealworms, while the other four products are produced through microbiological processes. Carbon dioxide from beer fermentation serves as an input to these processes. Together with methane from the anaerobic digestion of wastewater, it is used to produce single-cell protein and volatile fatty acids as ingredients for pet food, chlorine for disinfectants, and ectoin for cosmetics.

The Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment

Together with our work package partners from AINIA, the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) is conducting a comprehensive Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) to integrate and assess the potential economic, environmental and social impacts of these new value chains. For this purpose, data are collected from the production process of these bio-based product systems to perform a Techno-Economic Assessment (TEA) as well as Environmental and Social Life Cycle Assessments (e-LCA & s-LCA). The results of these assessments are compared with those of existing reference products to develop a holistic understanding of the environmental, economic and social impacts associated with the assessed products and to contextualize this assessment.

Initial analysis has shown that electricity consumption appears to be the primary driver of environmental impacts on the pilot scale. In the coming months, we will continue to expand and refine our modeling, and we are also working on scaling up our modeling from pilot to industrial scale to enable an ex-ante assessment of the economic, environmental and social impacts and hotspots of the five value chains when fully operational.

At the Life Cycle Management conference in September 2025 in Palermo, ZHAW will present insights into the work of our work package on the environmental, economic and social impacts of this bio-based economy, along with different ex-ante scenarios.

Stay tuned for more updates on our progress and the exciting developments in the CHEERS project!