Issue 03/2016

Report
Co-products from
potato processing
Dutch company converts a co-product into high value technical grade
potato starch
Most of our readers certainly know that certain bioplastics
can be made from plant starches of different
sources, for example PLA from corn starch or
TPS from potato starch etc..
And you probably also know that besides food and feed
starch has been used for multiple technical applications
for decades. Now, besides using starch directly derived
from plants, those mentioned above and others, there is
also a lot of waste starch available that can be used for
such purposes.
However, “we don’t call it waste, we call it side streams
or co-products,” as Roel van Haeren, Sales Director of the
Dutch company Novidon explains. In order to get as much
as possible first-hand information on this topic bioplastics
MAGAZINE visited Novidon in Nijmegen in mid May. Here is
our report:
During the industrial processing of potatoes, for
example into French fries, potato crisps or other products
a lot of so-called side stream potato starch is coming free.
In most cases the starch is in the process water. “We take
Figure 1
Figure 2
this starch out of the process water and bring it to our factory,”
says Christiaan Oei, Area Sales Manager of Novidon.
Novidon is part of the Duynie Group, specialized on the
utilization of co-products of different agricultural product
industries. Their slogan is “Care for co-products”, well
explained in a YouTube-clip on their website. Duynie Group
itself is owned by Royal Cosun, a cooperative of 9,500
sugar beet farmers and the only one sugar company in
the Netherlands. Novidon runs plants in Nijmegen (The
Netherlands), Wrexham (UK), Veurne (Belgium) and Hodiskov
(Czech Republic).
In the past the starch containing process water of the potato
industry went to wastewater treatment plants, landfill or was
converted into animal feed. But Novidon thought that there
was too much value in the starch and decided to upgrade
the co-product into high value technical grade potato starch.
Today Novidon is utilizing this raw material all year round. The
company collects the side stream starch from more than 75
different suppliers spread all over Europe. And while Novidon
is specialized on potato starch, the Duynie Group also collects
other co-products such as potato peels, sugar beet pulp,
wheat distillery syrup, potato flakes or peas that are out of
specs for human consumption etc. “A total of ± 4.5 million
tonnes a year, which represents one truckload per 4 minutes”,
Roel says. These co-products are converted by different
Duynie Group companies into feed, pet-food and other uses
including the energy recovery through anaerobic digestion in
biogas plants as a last step.
The products of Novidon are native and modified potato
starch. Basically these products can be distinguished into
three major groups.
The first group is native starch. This starch goes into
applications such as the paper industry (paper mills), textiles
and also into the bioplastics industry.
The second product group is drilling starches. These
products are used for oil and gas drilling in many countries
in the Middle East, North and West Africa, for example. In
oil and gas drilling a so-called drilling mud is being used
e. g. for cooling, cleaning and lubricating the drill bit and for
maintaining the walls of the borehole. Water based drilling
muds can consist of starch and 30 to 35 other ingredients
such as bentonite (clay). Starch in combination with bentonite
provides very good properties in terms of preventing process
water (fluid loss reducing) from entering the surrounding soil.
And the last group are adhesives for various applications.
This includes wall paper paste, glue for paper sacks or
labelling glues.
36 bioplastics MAGAZINE [03/16] Vol. 11