MUNICH (AP) — Two students in Munich, drinking beer on the couch in their dorm room in 2022, chatted about a recent lecture describing Colombia’s use of banana fibers to make sustainable building materials.
Wouldn’t it be great, the students from the Technical University of Munich joked, to do something similar here in Bavaria with a local product – perhaps with the waste of the region’s famous hops?
The next day they started investigating. Within months they had launched a startup called HopfON – a play on Hopfen, the German word for hops – which is now scaling up from its laboratory models and pilot project to real-world products.
While HopfON’s goal is to reduce the waste caused by the construction and beer industries by creating products that use the leaves, spines and vines left after the hop harvest, the Society of Hop Research breeds at the heart of Bavaria new varieties that reduce the plant’s hop production. redundant from the start.
The numbers surrounding waste are staggering. More than a third of all waste generated in the European Union comes from the construction and demolition sector. This is evident from an EU report published in January.
And when hops are harvested every autumn The German region of Hallertau – the largest hop growing area in the world, which is approx an hour north of Oktoberfest – for every kilogram of material in the cones that can be used to brew beer, 3.5 kilograms of wasted biomass is lost from the rest of the factory. That’s a ratio of roughly 20% usable product to 80% waste.
Some of the hop waste can be used as fertilizer and some can be sold to biogas plants to produce energy. But most of it is unusable for farmers, who may be forced to rent additional farmland to dump piles of waste with their crops. The piles can ferment and emit greenhouse gases – and sometimes catch fire.
“We saw enormous potential in sourcing locally and also in using a waste stream that was neglected by almost most people,” HopfON entrepreneur Mauricio Fleischer Acuña told The Associated Press.
HopfON aims to reduce construction industry waste and global warming emissions by limiting the need for finite resources through hop-made products. The startup has also launched a circular model where customers can return their products to be turned into new materials.
During the fall harvest, the team takes the fresh material from farms and dries it immediately, says Fleischer Acuña, then removes all impurities and recyclable metals. It is chopped up and separated for a patent-pending process that uses binders already present in the plant to convert the biomass into products such as acoustic panels, thermal insulation and building boards.
A coworking space in the southwestern German city of Mannheim was the startup’s first customer for the acoustic panels. A future plan is to create drywall alternatives.
Fleischer Acuña and his partners – Marlene Stechl and Thomas Rojas Sonderegger, the two students in the dorm – also plan to expand their business into using other organic materials and will eventually change their name from HopfON to onmatter.
The trio is not the only group in Bavaria that wants to solve this problem. At the Society of Hop Research in Hüll, researchers have developed new hop varieties that are more sustainable and produce less waste. Managing Director Walter König says the new varieties mean that for every kilogram of cones, only 1.2 to 1.4 kilograms of waste is created.
Perhaps most importantly, König said the research hasn’t sacrificed the quality of the hops, meaning they ultimately maintain the traditional taste brewers and beer lovers crave.
“It’s very sophisticated to bring them all together for a new variety that smells good and fits the beers we need,” he added.
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Pietro De Cristofaro contributed to this report.
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