Comet Bio, in partnership with Meliora, has commissioned a production plant in Kalundborg, at the same time renting space in the Danish seaport for storage ahead of export.

The 3,816 m2 area, which Comet Bio will enter on 1 March 2023, sits within the East Harbour, which previously housed the port's container terminal (moved to the New West Harbour).

In Kalundborg, Comet Bio produces Arrabina, a prebiotic fibre arabinoxylan made from wheat straw. "Kalundborg was chosen because there was already a factory here where bio-ethanol is made from straw. You separate the ethanol from our fibre product in a production process," Freddy Dybdahl Andersen, Operations Manager at Comet Bio Denmark, explained.

The output of Comet Bio's Danish factory will be stored in tank containers for shipping over the Atlantic, where the product will be dried into powder form for release onto the North American market (the company is awaiting EU approval to sell its goods on the European market too).

The Canadians have also joined the Kalundborg Symbiosis, a local circular economy initiative, already running for five decades, for industrial organisations to work together to share excess energy, water, and materials, so less goes to waste. "We use local partners for logistics and a local company for cleaning our tank containers. This way, we try to keep as much as possible locally in Kalundborg employment-wise," Dybdahl Andersen underlined.

Photo: Port of Kalundborg