AUSTEP-AUSTEAM ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION SPA

Their core work

Austep is a Milano-based Italian SME specialising in environmental engineering, specifically wastewater treatment and filtration systems for industrial and agri-food applications. Their participation in the AFTERLIFE project — focused on advanced filtration technologies for recovering and converting fractions from wastewater — reflects their core commercial activity in designing and deploying separation and recovery systems for organic waste streams. In the MycoKey project they contributed alongside environmental and food safety specialists, suggesting expertise in monitoring, treatment, or mitigation of contaminants in agri-food processing environments. The company name ("Environmental Protection") and the BBI-funded AFTERLIFE project together indicate an organisation that bridges environmental engineering and the circular bioeconomy — converting waste streams into recoverable resources rather than treating them as disposal problems.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Both H2020 projects began in the narrow 2016–2017 window, so a clear chronological evolution is difficult to establish from this dataset alone. That said, the two projects do represent distinct technical domains: MycoKey addressed biological contamination monitoring in grain-based food and feed, while AFTERLIFE moved toward physical separation engineering and bio-based resource recovery from waste. If this sequence reflects a deliberate trajectory, Austep appears to be broadening from food safety monitoring into upstream environmental processing — turning waste treatment into value recovery rather than simply removing hazards.

Austep is moving toward circular-economy infrastructure for agri-food waste, making them a relevant partner for projects targeting bio-based material recovery, food processing effluent treatment, or industrial symbiosis in the food sector.

How they like to work

Austep has participated exclusively as a non-leading consortium member across both projects, suggesting they are most comfortable as a specialist technical contributor rather than a project driver. Despite their small size and funding share, they have engaged with 46 distinct consortium partners — a notably broad network for just two projects — pointing to large, multi-partner consortia where they occupy a specific technical niche. This profile is typical of an SME that brings proprietary technology or hands-on implementation capability that larger research-heavy partners want in their consortium but do not wish to coordinate themselves.

Despite holding only two H2020 participations, Austep has built a surprisingly wide network of 46 unique partners spanning 17 countries — a footprint consistent with involvement in the large-scale consortia that RIA and BBI-RIA projects typically form. Their European reach is real but appears to be a byproduct of consortium membership rather than independent international operations.

What sets them apart

Austep sits at a rare intersection of environmental engineering and agri-food processing, which gives them credibility with both food industry clients and waste treatment operators — two audiences that rarely share the same supplier. As an Italian SME in Milano, they are positioned within one of Europe's most active agri-food industrial clusters, which likely drives practical demand for exactly the kind of filtration and contamination-mitigation solutions they develop. For a consortium builder, they bring implementable industrial technology rather than pure research output, which is precisely what BBI-JU and RIA calls require to demonstrate feasibility at scale.

Highlights from their portfolio

• AFTERLIFE
  A Bio-Based Industries Joint Undertaking project (BBI-RIA) targeting advanced filtration for agri-food wastewater recovery — a high-relevance circular-economy topic with strong industrial pull and commercial application potential.
• MycoKey
  A major RIA project running four years (2016-2020) covering six major mycotoxin classes across three key cereal crops with both ICT detection tools and feed additive interventions — rare in its breadth across the full food-feed contamination chain.