In nature, there is no such thing as waste. Elements like carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulphur move through ecosystems in endless cycles – constantly transforming, renewing, and returning to the earth. This principle of circularity is at the heart of ANIPH.
Funded by the EU, ANIPH is a healthcare project developing next-generation wound dressings and recyclable water-barrier packaging. All products are made from bio-based materials that safely break down in the environment, including soil, freshwater, and the ocean.
ANIPH adheres to circular design principles, ensuring that every product can return to nature at the end of its life.
The biobased and biodegradable plastic products (BBpPs) developed within the project belong to the PHBV and PHA biopolymer families. These products are specifically designed for humanitarian contexts in which proper waste management is often unfeasible, such as war zones and places hit by natural disasters.
The ANIPH products will be:
Engineered to offer modern wound care solutions while ensuring a minimised environmental impact.
Designed to be recyclable and biodegradable in all relevant environments, supporting both product integrity and ecological responsibility.
Implemented to predict biodegradation, material properties, and ecotoxicity, while ensuring the traceability of materials and products.
Current fossil-based plastic products take between 100 and 1000 years to degrade, thus harming the environment.
ANIPH will enhance the application of circular economy principles throughout the entire lifecycle of its products.
Designing a-priori the lifecycle of BBpPs is extremely challenging, as biodegradation must be regarded as a ‘system property’, considering material properties, the receiving environment, and a specific evidence-based timeframe.
ANIPH will develop a tailored design of BBpPs lifecycles, controlling the key factors affecting biodegradation in all relevant environments.
Current standards test methods to assess plastics biodegradation in open environments have low reproducibility and do not consider all the material and environmental factors involved in the process.
ANIPH will propose an innovative approach to ensure reproducibility and standardisation of biodegradation assessment.
The lack of an enabling environment hinders the development of BBpPs. Inadequate governance and insufficient stakeholder information may well slow down the BBpPs value chains.
ANIPH will contribute to creating an enabling environment, through Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) approaches, and contributing to Information and Labelling Systems on products.
Nature is where everything originates and eventually returns. It is precisely from nature that renewable residues are extracted, and it is back to nature where ANIPH’s wound dressings and packaging biodegrade, closing the loop of their lifecycle.
The renewable residues used in ANIPH’s biotechnological process include sugar-rich liquor residues and hydrolysed yeast from brewing residues, which provide essential carbon and nitrogen sources, respectively.
These residues, combined with other raw materials, such as volatile fatty acids, will be studied as co-feedstock to obtain biopolymer with a very high 3HV content (15-30% 3HV).
By optimising the combination of feedstocks and precisely controlling the fermentation processes, ANIPH is able to modulate both the chemical composition and the crystallinity of the biopolymers.
The upstream production of PHBV and PHN in the ANIPH processes relies on the biotechnological conversion of renewable residues and selected raw materials through optimised fermentation.
This phase yields biopolymers with controlled crystallinity. The process also targets high extraction efficiency, providing a sustainable and adaptable base for the subsequent formulation and compounding steps.
A formulation and compounding strategy will be developed to achieve stable and processable PHA compounds for the different target applications while programming biodegradation.
This is in order to balance processability, mechanical and thermal properties with a safe, enhanced biodegradation, all aimed at developing the target compounds.
As a result of the previous process, PHBV and PHN compounds will be developed to serve as the basis for cast/blown extrusion and 3D printing processes aimed at producing the wound dressings and their respective packages.
Additives include stabilisers, processing and biodegradability enhancers, and nucleating agents
These processes will enable the production of biodegradable water-barrier packages and wound dressings.
In both cast/blown extrusion and 3D printing, key factors such as design, surface-to-volume ratio, and processing parameters will be considered, with additional focus on customisation and tailored manufacturing for 3D printing, which will also imply the addition of some medical bio-additives (probiotics cellulose as alternative to conventional antibiotics).
Biodegradation is the ending stage ANIPH products lifecycle, that gently fade away in all relevant environments after having served their purpose.
Meet our fellow projects - PHAntastic, ViSS and MAGICBIOMAT - and discover how they rethink materials and value chains for a more sustainable future.
ANIPH will be presented at the event organised by the Spanish Association for Standardisation (UNE), focused on bioplastics and their future standardisation.
Introducing ANIPH, its presentation video, communication kit and first events. Our newsletter is out now!
