CAFE · Circular Agri-Food Ecosystems: bringing nutrients back to the soil
Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2022-10-01 → 2025-03-31
- EU contribution
- €264,694
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Circular Agri-Food Ecosystems: bringing nutrients back to the soil
Agriculture requires a steady supply of fertilizers that notably contain nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P), two elements that are necessary for the plants to grow. However, the fertilizer supply-chain is far from secured for France and Europe that synthesize half or more of its fertilizer from imported "natural" gas (meaning "fossil") and phosphate rocks. These notably come from Russia, the US, or Algeria, for the gas, and Morroco for the mined phosphate rocks. Beyond the geostrategic risks, phosphate is a finite resource which cannot be mined forever. Unfortunately, after we eat our food, the phosphorus we ingest is excreted in urine and feces, and half or more if it is eventually lost at sea after being flushed in toilets and leaving the sanitation system. This linear and extractive system, together with current fertilizer application methods, has incurred great social and environmental costs around the world, leading to significant biodiversity loss, as well as a degradation of water and soil quality. Source separation of organic matter and its recovery are likely to be critical for the long-term sustainability of the agri-food and waste-management systems in an increasingly urban world. Indeed, the transformation of kitchen or green waste and human excreta can provide invaluable resources such as compost, fertilizers, or energy and eventually remove the need for synthetic fertilizers entirely. The aim of the project was thus to develop tools and scenarios to assess how, for any given territory, source-separation and fertilizer made from human excreta could bring the agri-food and sanitation systems on the path to circularity.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
In current ""conventional"" agricultural practices, most farmers depend on synthetic fertilizers and nutrients extracted during harvests are seldom brought back to the soil. This open-circuit organization of food systems induces the prospect of phosphate shortage and consumes large amounts of abiotic resources and energy to generate fertilizers or process nutrients once they end up in sewage. Such a linear and extractive system, together with current fertilizer application methods, has incurred great social and environmental costs around the world, leading to significant biodiversity loss, soil erosion and salinisation as well as nutrient leaching. Finally, animal-based diets in the largest economies further increase the pressure on food systems as feeding animals inflates land and nutrient use.Source separation of organic matter and its recovery are likely to be critical for the long-term sustainability of the agri-food and waste-management systems in an increasingly urban world. Indeed, the transformation of kitchen or green waste and human excreta can provide invaluable resources such as compost, fertilizers, or energy and eventually remove the need for synthetic fertilizers.This project will develop prospective scenarios for nutrient recovery and assess how far they can bring the agri-food system on the path to circularity. Using complex networks and systems methods, we will convert and analyze existing datasets to generate logistics networks associated to these scenarios. These networks will model the fluxes of organic matter between sources (habitations), processing or storage locations, and sinks (parcels). We will also assess the impact of dietary changes and low-fertilizer or agro-ecological practices compared to business-as-usual situations. This will enable us to evaluate the technical feasibility of these recovery scenarios and quantify how much they improve agri-food sustainability and can help local actors tackle their socio-ecological transition.""
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/101063239
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e51c8c06fa&appId=PPGMS
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e5fa17d458&appId=PPGMS
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e5fa19b81e&appId=PPGMS
Data: CORDIS, © European Union