Discover the achievements of the 2014-2020 NPA projects
Seven years of cooperation between people, communities, and organisations across thousands of kilometres made a difference in the Northern Periphery and Arctic regions.
Browse the NPA map of results to discover our stories of cooperation. Pick a dot from the map and scroll down to read about people who have met similar minded colleagues and together found solutions for their shared challenges.
Use the +/- buttons in the top left corner of the map to zoom in/out or click on the regions to display the NPA project stories.
Turning waste into new products
What do a brewery, a data centre, and a chicken farm have in common?
In Sweden, the team tested how spent grain (waste from brewery) can be used to grow mealworms. Bottenvikens brewery produces 1 ton of wet spent grain per week. Instead of throwing it away, they use the grain to grow mealworms. The necessary heat is obtained from a nearby datacenter. Once the worms are grown, they are used to feed chickens at the local farm instead of imported feed, and the drier spent grain is used as an organic fertilizer in greenhouses or sold to conventional shops. This process demonstrated how to keep biomass in the loop as long as it is economically and technically feasible before returning nutrients back to the soil.
Based on the principle that one man´s trash is another man´s treasure, SYMBIOMA explored how waste products in food industry can be further used as raw materials. Focusing on brewing and distilling industry, potato manufacturing, and fish product manufacturing, the team first analyzed the possibilities (and challenges) for using the waste from these industries, the available services and technical knowledge within NPA based organisations, and then prepared a roadmap to support SMEs´ in successful implementation of circular economy principles in their business cases.
SYMBIOMA project was also featured in Interreg Highlights, a series of articles presenting how cooperation contributes to greener Europe. You can also listen about this story on This is Europe podcast.
Mattias Bergström
Bottenvikens Bryggeri ABWe have had the opportunity to explore ventures that we would not have the resources for without the project. For instance, we made trials to grow mealworms in our spent brewer grains. The opportunity here was to explore how we locally could produce proteins for the chicken industry thus making use of our brewery waste and essentially become a supplier for other food industries. We have also tried to utilize spent grain in bread baking.