REGAIN

The agricultural sector is facing increasing pressure to reduce nitrogen emissions and to comply with stringent environmental targets at national and EU levels. Current chemical air scrubbers can effectively capture ammonia emissions, but produce large amounts of ammonia salts that are either returned to the field or treated as waste. 

REGAIN tackles this challenge by integrating current emission treatment systems with microalgal cultivation processes to convert these low-grade waste streams into high-value biomass, while focusing on insect rearing as a model for other livestock systems.  

A second challenge is the slow development of the microalgae sector, despite extensive research and investment over the past decades. A major limiting factor is the gap between experimental research and industrial implementation, as challenges at large-scale are not adequately captured in lab-scale studies. 

REGAIN addresses this gap by (i) establishing engineering-driven and molecularly grounded process development pipelines for robust microalgal cultivation processes, and (ii) leveraging interactions between algae and associated bacteria in non-axenic cultures to enhance performance and stability.