Biowaste valorisation is an attractive approach in the framework of the EU Waste Management policies and the development of a circular economy. Waste from biostreams and different biobased sources are being under-utilised as potential resource of valuable compounds. Fertilisers play an important role as suppliers of nutrients relying on their production heavily on fossil mineral resources. European Fertiliser industry is besides very dependent on imports of these raw materials, being vulnerable to supply and pricing policies. Main objective of the proposal is to build up a breakthrough concept of Fertiliser Industry, strengthening European competitiveness and boosting the biobased economy potential, through the development of a new value chain, which will achieve turning solid and liquid residues, specifically ashes of different origins and livestock effluents, into high quality valuable products, a new generation of fertilisers. NEWFERT will focus on a viable and cost-effective industrial nutrient recycling scheme, developing new biorefining technologies aimed at increasing nutrient recovery ratios and mitigating environmental and socio-economical impact of the current fertilisers by replacing non renewable and fossil nutrients with biobased materials in their composition. Projected benefits also include substantial energy savings and CO2 emissions reduction. NEWFERT aims to decrease raw material dependency, prevent resource depletion and reduce the environmental impact increasing significantly the Fertiliser industry sustainability. The work organisation has been designed to link and pursue a successful industrial integration supported by a solid life-cycle cost analysis. The strategy of the work plan is based on 8 workpackages. NEWFERT consortium is lead by FERTIBERIA and composed by a balanced set of 6 partners from 4 European Union member countries: biobased industries, SMEs, RTOs and academic institutions covering nutrients recovery from biobased waste field.

DeliSoil will adopt a multi-actor, transdisciplinary approach to co-design processes that minimise food processing waste and valorise its by-products. We will apply a circular bioeconomy approach to the waste hierarchy, creating sustainable soil improvers in support of soil health in Europe. DeliSoil’s 5 regional Living Labs (LLs), with actors along the entire food value chain, will use innovative technologies to convert residues from food processing and production industries into tailored soil improvers. Research partners and companies will evaluate the soil improvers in state-of-the-art laboratories, and landowners will test the project’s solutions. The tailored soil improvers will be tested for stability, biosafety and molecular parameters, and their impacts on soil health, agronomical performance, and environmental risks will be evaluated. Environmental footprints will also be measured for selected products. We will identify technological, legislative, financial, and social barriers and enablers for the conversion of food processing residue streams into organic soil improvers and fertilising products, and use these results to analyse fairness throughout the LL value chains. Together with stakeholders, we will build communities and create networks to facilitate knowledge sharing of DeliSoil’s key exploitable results, empower interdisciplinary design processes to improve soil health through the valorisation of food by-products, and increase societal soil literacy. The Living Labs will share their solutions for using side-streams from vegetable, meat, insect cultivation, mixed food, tomato, olive oil, and wine industry actors. Our proposed Lighthouses will allow inter-European partnering and demonstrate improved waste management sites integrating optimal practices in a circular bioeconomy framework. We will work in close cooperation with other EU projects and the European Soil Observatory (EUSO) to ensure coordinated delivery of Soil Mission goals.

In line with the Zero Pollution action plan and the Farm to Fork Strategy, Nutribudget will develop the prototype of a first-of-its-kind integrated nutrient management platform, called Nutriplatform, in various regions across Europe. The Nutriplatform will operate as a decision-support tool (DST) for farmers, advisors and regional authorities and before the end of the project this prototype (as a stand-alone or integrated in the existing EC promoted FaST tool for nutrient management) will be tested and used by at least 40.000 farmers across Europe. Firstly, the development of the Nutriplatform will be based on the algorithms of two advanced newly developed holistic Nutrimodels that quantify the impact of agronomic mitigation measures to optimize nutrient budget and flow across scales (from farm to Europe), across elements (C) and nutrients (N, P, K, S, Ca, Mg, Cu and Zn) and by looking at various agronomic and environmental targets. The measures will be derived from (I) existing knowledge, including input from relevant EU projects (e.g. the 4 on nutrient recycling from the call) and (II) new data from field experiments with innovative mitigation measures and combinations thereof that connect animal and crop production via agro-processing industries in 5 pilot regions (4 nutrient hotspot and 1 nutrient deficient area) in 4 different climate regions in Europe. Secondly, these measures will be linked to relevant monitoring indicators, called NutriKPIs, for agronomic performance in different farming systems, nutrient emissions and impact on biodiversity. All will be done in co-creation, according to a Nutri-actor approach, with a consortium of 17 partners from 10 countries that are all experts in their respective fields. Thereby, Nutribudget will contribute to systemically optimize nutrient management across different agricultural production systems and regions in the EU to reduce pollution due to the excessive use of nutrients and nutrient losses to the environment.

Imported mineral phosphate and fossil energy-intensive nitrogen fertilisers cause major detrimental impacts on the environment, whilst nutrient-rich side-streams/organic waste remain under-utilised. By optimising usage of bio-based fertilisers (BBF) from side-streams, ensuring their safety, building evidence-based trust in their usage and developing legislative framework for their use, it will be possible to reduce dependence upon mineral/fossil fertilisers, benefiting the environment and the EU’s economy. LEX4BIO aims to achieve this by collecting and processing regional nutrient stock, flow, surplus and deficiency data, and reviewing and assessing the required technological solutions. Furthermore, socioeconomic benefits and limitations to increase substitution of mineral fertiliser for BBFs will be analysed. A key result of LEX4BIO will be a universal, science-based toolkit for optimising the use of BBFs in agriculture and to assess their environmental impact in terms of non-renewable energy use, greenhouse gas emissions and other LCA impact categories. LEX4BIO provides for the first time connection between production technologies of BBFs and regional requirements for the safe use of BBFs. The large variation between EU regions in nutrient flows and regional requirements for fertilisers will be estimated by harmonised methods to produce the knowledge basis needed to set up feasible ways to redirect the nutrient flows where needed. This will be followed by classifying the best available technologies for producing regionally tailored BBFs to secure high agricultural productivity, as well as environmental protection, food safety and human health. In LEX4BIO, the knowledge basis and recommendations will be gathered and processed together with stakeholders across Europe, providing best solutions for decreasing the dependency on imported fertilisers, closing the nutrient cycles and improving sustainability of European farming systems.