Waste4Soil

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), about a third of food produced is wasted throughout the food system, from the field to final consumers, which represents more than 1.3 billion tons per year. The variety of food chain suppliers offers a wide range of feedstocks that can be physically, chemically, or biologically altered to form an array of biofertilizers and soil amendments. Valorising food waste into biofertilizers and soil amendments has great potential to combat land degradation in agricultural areas and can reduce the dependability of using convention mineral fertilizers thanks to their high nutrients content. Moreover, food waste, if not properly managed, can impact negatively on the environment, particularly because of the discharge of nutrient and organic matter in water bodies. Thus, using food waste is an efficient way to reach circularity and keep products and materials value as long as possible in the economy and the society, while preventing to damage the environment. In addition to a strengthened circular economy and less pressure on the environment, multiple benefits may be obtained from waste valorisation, by the reduction of GHG emitted during usual waste treatment (landfill and incineration), of waste treatment cost, and of landfill’s volume.

Waste4Soil envisions the development of 10 technological and methodological solutions and a user-driven standardized Evaluation Framework for recycling food processing residues from the food industry into take into beneficial soil improvers, local, biobased circular soil improvers for improved soil health. The project focuses on assessing and improving the effectiveness of existing routes of food waste management to soil improver components, formulation and application methods by focusing on:

1) Anaerobic digestion residues by employing novel nutrient separation including Selective Electrodialysis, bio-electrochemical and membrane systems;

2) Novel efficient Biochar production from food processing wastes and digestates;

3) BioPhosphate processing;

4) Effective composting process of solid residues;

5) Protein hydrolysates acting as soil improvers and AD-Microalgae combined processes for soil biostimulants and;

6) An enabling management platform applied in all living labs, with a growing database of data analytics, route optimisation applications, soil health evaluations and application recipe’s, commercial aspects, and the capacity to use IoT devices in logistics.