LANDFEED

A sustainable agricultural strategy requires collaboration between the fertiliser and farming sectors to mobilise underutilised waste streams and transition to renewable nutrients. In this sense, LANDFEED aims to:

• Make use of underexploited bio-wastes in the fertiliser value chain, involving all stakeholders - waste providers, fertiliser companies, end-users, and farms, among others.
• Produce, validate, and demonstrate 10 new innovative bio-based fertilisers at competitive prices, with an expected production and sale of 580,000 tonnes within 10 years from their market introduction, thereby enhancing the European biofertiliser market positioning.
• Improve the sustainability of fertilisers and agricultural management, while additionally reducing nutrient losses to the environment by using solutions that prevent water pollution and do not produce impurities in soil.
• Reduce the environmental impact of the fertiliser value chain by cutting nutrient extraction's environmental footprint by 20%.
• Enhance the safety, sustainability, and reliability of the fertiliser market by using bio-wastes from various sources, improving fertiliser equivalence value, as well as creating safe, user-friendly products for farmers.
• Maximise innovation synergies to demonstrate new products by closely working with stakeholders from five different geographical areas (Spain, Italy, France, Poland, and Greece) to increase their acceptance and establish a feasible commercial exploitation plan for the profitable use of the results.
• Establish EU-level certification guidelines and quality standards, while additionally raising awareness among farmers and end-users about the effectiveness of new fertiliser products to boost crop production.
• Enable the scale-up of industrial processes focused on the production of large volumes of biowaste fertilisers.
• Maximise the medium- and long-term impact by disseminating project results to relevant stakeholders through a tailored communication strategy to facilitate swift industrial uptake.

LANDFEED’s expected impacts include:

• Ensuring circularity in processes and value chains by optimising and replicating innovative technologies for recovering nutrients from waste.
• Generating high-quality new knowledge to unlock new bio-based fertilisers from underexploited sources.
• Enabling the use of underexploited sources, such as agri-food residues (dairy, olive oil industry, orange industry, fish, and meat); food waste; sewage sludge (both industrial and non-industrial wastewater treatment plants); sludge from freshwater fish farms; waste from anaerobic digestion, residual paste (microalgae), and natural resources such as volcanic ashes, for bio-based products.
• Accelerating the transition towards climate neutrality and enhanced circularity in the European bio-based sector by improving efficient sourcing, cost-effective logistics, and agronomic characterisation.
• Producing 95,000 tonnes of bio-based fertilisers with €245.35 million in sales per year, contributing to a competitive EU bioeconomy for a sustainable future.
• Reducing Europe's reliance on non-renewable fossil resources and mineral reserves, while additionally mitigating climate change impacts and facilitating Europe's shift towards a circular economy.
• Promoting sustainable economic growth and soil health across 3.9 million hectares; creating 150 new jobs through a robust bio-based innovation ecosystem.
• Aligning with European policies and strategies, contributing to sustainable feedstock supply and scaling up bio-based products markets.
• Creating a real internal market for secondary raw materials of biological origin in the EU.