Biovalorisation of the shell of crustaceans into chitosan: sustainable production in Quebec of a high added value biomolecule

Chitosan is a high added value material used for biomedical, water treatment, fertilizer and bioplastics applications. This material comes from the extraction and processing of chitin from shellfish waste, an under-exploited bio-resource in Quebec. Indeed, the current method for accessing it is based on the use of heated, viscous and highly corrosive liquids, and leads to the formation of aqueous effluents which are difficult and expensive to treat. These economic and ecological limitations hamper the development in Quebec of such a technology. Dr. Moores’s team recently discovered a new method of transforming chitin into chitosan based on the principles of mechanochemistry and aging where the reactions take place exclusively in the solid phase. This process consumes less energy and resources and generates less waste. It is also possible to scale it, which has already been validated at the kg scale. In addition, this method produces high molecular weight (MW) chitosan, a new material which cannot be manufactured by conventional techniques. This project has 4 objectives: 1) to adapt the process from different marine bioresidus; 2) to improve the process for targeting a chitosan with a PM currently on the market, in order to meet the current demand; 3) validate the scaling in a pilot representative of the industrial process, i.e. 50kg; 4) Perform a techno-economic analysis to fix the next steps of commercial scale-up.