Horizon Europe ReLeaf Project: Recycling locally produced bio-waste to ensure the affordability and availability of innovative bio-fertilizers
- Type Project
- Status Firmado
- Execution 2024 -2028
- Assigned Budget 6.504.027,75 €
- Scope Europeo
- Main source of financing Horizonte Europa 2021-2027
- Project website Proyecto ReLeaf
Recent studies have identified three main waste streams for bio-based fertilizer (BBF) production: manure, sewage sludge, and food chain residues. While manure constitutes the most important waste stream, most of it is unsuitable for high-quality fertilizer production due to contamination. The potential of sewage sludge and food chain residues remains underutilized.
The EU-funded ReLeaf project will create essential ingredients for fertilizers from common European waste streams. Specifically, it will demonstrate extraction techniques at five sites and produce cost-effective fertilizers at two of them to reduce dependence on foreign supply chains and petroleum-based resources in fertilizer production. In addition, the project will evaluate the effectiveness of fertilizers under different climatic and soil conditions at four sites.
Several studies have identified three main waste streams that are the most promising to be valorized into bio-based fertilizers (BBF): (1) manure, (2) sewage sludge, and (3) food chain residues. Of these, manure is the largest waste stream, accounting for more than 70% of the nutrients, but several studies have been conducted in the last 10 years aiming at its valorization as BBF and have shown that it is a feasible feedstock for obtaining N-rich streams and organic amendments that can be directly used as BBF, but most of them are not suitable to be used as ingredients for the centralized production of high-quality fertilizers due to the presence of contaminants such as heavy metals (mainly Zn and Cu) and organic matter.
Sewage sludge and food chain waste have not yet been thoroughly investigated at the levels required for industrial implementation, so their fertilizer potential remains underexploited. The ReLEAF project is based on the advancement and widespread demonstration (across five technology demonstration sites) of a suite of extraction techniques to produce key BBF ingredients from predominant waste streams across Europe: sewage sludge, fish processing waste and wastewater, mixed food waste, and agri-food residues. The formulation and production (across two sites) of cost-effective BBF will address the serious challenges of externalities (i.e., dependence on foreign supply chains (P and K) and petroleum-derived resources (N)) of fertilizer production and use in European soils, along with security of supply and waste valorization.
Research on the effectiveness and replicability of BBFs under the varying climatic conditions and soil ecosystems of four different field demonstration sites, in addition to co-creation activities, will enable regional engagement with stakeholders to promote widespread acceptance, while industrial participation will facilitate rapid scale-up and industrialization of the proposed technologies.
- ACONDICIONAMIENTO TARRASENSE ASSOCIACION (LEITAT)
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