Pro Natura: Upcycling Japanese Knotweed
How can Pro Natura valorize excess Japanese Knotweed and help restore biodiversity in Flanders?
#greenwastetogreenresource #fossilfreefuture #mycelium
Japanese Knotweed is rampant among Flemish roads, railways, waterways, towpaths, and more. It’s an exotic plant that’s detrimental for our biodiversity. When you mow it, each plant chopping left on the ground can take root and flourish. Can we solve this catch-22 and transform it into jobs and bio-based materials?
What motivated Pro Natura to upcycle Japanese Knotweed?
Nathalie Devriendt, Biomass & Innovation expert at Pro Natura:
Pro Natura does green maintenance. We do this to create safe employment for people who don’t prosper in the regular labor market. But our mission is also to increase biodiversity.
Japanese Knotweed is rampant in Flemish roads and disastrous for our biodiversity. If you want to get rid of it, you need to mow it and then pick up each and every single piece of chopping. That’s a lot of labor. Our clients, which are local governments and maintenance companies, usually can’t afford this investment. So the only thing we can do is leave the Japanese Knotweed as it is, to avoid further spreading.
But what if we could help our clients reduce the cost of getting rid of Japanese Knotweed? That’s the question that got us started. If we find a way to turn Japanese Knotweed choppings into a valuable resource, we create more employment, increase biodiversity and produce a local, bio-based material.
What has Pro Natura been doing with its green waste all these years?
One of our partners turns it into compost. The value this compost has for our soils often goes unrecognized. On the one hand, we must see compost for the important resource that it is. On the other hand, we don’t need to turn green waste into compost straight away. A better option would be to transform it into material applications. Currently, most materials in the world are fossil-based, with numbers increasing each year. Upcycling biomass creates jobs, reduces the share of fossil-based products and reduces climate impact. Compost will be the end-of-life destination for these bio-based products.
How did GLIMPS.bio help you get started with upcycling?
Lean research and testing. We didn’t have a big budget and didn’t need extensive academic research on upcycling Japanese Knotweed. We just needed to know: can we grow mycelium on this? How? Will it sell? GLIMPS.bio was excellent at providing the hands-on research we needed. I’d dare say this inspired our way of working for all the innovation work we’ve been doing since.
Network. GLIMPS.bio helped us get in touch with a broad network of potential clients and partners.
Training. We didn’t just need to know whether it was generally possible to grow a product-worthy mycelium on Japanese Knotweed. We needed to know whether this was possible for our team. GLIMPS.bio trained us to follow the procedure and we quickly learned this wasn’t the case. Which is a good thing - to learn quickly and look for better fits.
What did you learn from growing mycelium on biomass?
It put both my feet on the ground in terms of how tricky it is to upcycle biomass with fungi. The least flaw in keeping the environment sterile can thwart all your effort. It’s an innovative, promising way of upcycling and I still wholly believe in its capacities for bio-based production. However, in practical terms we learned that pushing this innovation process further is not an investment we as Pro Natura can make. We’ve since found ways to make fibers from our biomass: a product we can sell and a process we can handle.
All in all, getting our hands dirty in the lab and growing mycelium ourselves was an invigorating journey. I learned a lot about mycelium and lean innovation, learnings that transcend this particular project.
What’s your advice to others who want to upcycle biomass?
As bio-based product applications are still a fairly new thing on the market, chances are you’ll have to do product development all the way to the end client. You start by creating a bio-based material and selling it to producers and designers. But if they aren’t convinced of its value, you’ll have to co create a product with them that their clients want. That’s how you open the market.
Embrace complexity. If you as a project leader aren’t excited by challenge and surprise, you’ll get stuck. But if wicked problems are just your thing, this is for you.
Pictures: Aaron Lapeirre
“We just needed to know: can we grow mycelium on this? How? Will it sell? GLIMPS.bio was excellent at providing the hands-on research we needed. I’d dare say this inspired our way of working for all the innovation work we’ve been doing since. ”
— Nathalie Devriendt, Biomass & Innovation expert at Pro Natura
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from fossil to bio-based.
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