The GreenSME Difference: Beginning SilviBio's Manufacturing Journey

One of the challenges of developing patent-pending innovation is how to go from lab to production scale. Here at SilviBio, we’ve been quietly toiling away at this problem with our patent-pending peat-free growing media. Unlike your average peat-free growing media (also called potting soil), ours is coconut-coir free and made from locally available raw materials in our bioregion. This provides a number of benefits, such as being less vulnerable to increasing volatile international supply chains and having a more consistent product formulation. However, when you limit yourself to just what you can find here in the UK, sometimes you encounter very promising but fussy raw materials that resist industry standard processing methods and machinery. 

To overcome this, we’ve been collaborating with Bernabéu Consulting Group (BCG) over the past 6 months in the GreenSME programme to design our fully mechanised pilot production facility which can overcome our unique manufacturing challenge related to relying on a more circular and local first approach.

Together, our GreenSME programme addressed our challenges by first creating an Advanced Sustainability Action Plan that identified the need to improve manufacturing process efficiency as a key priority to improve our sustainability, and then matching us with manufacturing technology and sustainability experts to provide a solution. 

BCG has been a wonderful partner and source of expertise. They are a pioneering company that merges Environment and Industrial Activities to redefine production processes, through the mix of experts in process scaleup, plant design, production design with an environmental & sustainability focus.

With their help, we were able to map out the production processes and machinery required for a fully mechanised pilot production facility. Already, we’ve begun implementing our plan in our West Lothian facility and have greater ambitions to fulfill yet. Stay tuned for more updates! 

We’d readily recommend the GreenSME programme as a source of expert matchmaking and needs mapping. The vision of greenSME is to strengthen the SME capacity to adopt advanced technologies to become competitive and climate neutral, maximising the benefits for all parts of society, starting by upskilling and reskilling workers toward a sustainable EU manufacturing industry, with greater adaptability and resilience.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the GA 101058613.