EU Funding
Total Budget
Timeline
Countries: Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg and The Netherlands
Project summary
Europe is importing annually over 6 million ton of nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) fertiliser. NPK pricing is coupled to energy, mining, synthesis and transport costs. Russia and Ukraine were main N suppliers to EU, while P supply is heavily dependent on Moroccan resource intensive import. This makes North West Europe's agriculture highly dependent on world economic and geopolitical developments.
At the same time, essential nutrients in NWE are still lost in form of non-recycled organic resources from waste sector and nutrient surplus regions (e.g. Flanders, North Rhine Westphalia, The Netherlands) due to a predominating linear economic model. Nutrient deficit regions (e.g. Luxembourg, Ireland, Saarland) are still not supplied with recycling-derived fertilisers (RDF) from surplus regions, where innovative nutrient recovery enterprises have been established.
The Objective of ReNu2Cycle
The overall objective is to reduce NWE's dependency on fossil-based fertiliser imports with proven impacts on availability, ecological foot-print and price stability via transregional valorisation of recycled NPK from municipal, industrial waste and agricultural sector in Flanders, The Netherlands, Ireland, Saarland, Lower Saxony, Luxembourg.
ReNu2Cycle is building on the achievements of ReNu2Farm which provided basic and regional quantified fertiliser demand research. New co-development and implementation that need to be performed to adapt regional best-practices for NWE:
- Living lab concepts encouraging long-term co-innovation and implementation support.
- Maximising RDF use by creating innovative fertiliser blends and business solutions for producers portfolios including sustainability assessment.
- Traders will be empowered to consult/market RDFs.
- RDF use at (organic) agriculture farms will be assessed.
- All results will be capitalised in one transregional nutrient supply-demand strategy and regional action plans.
Resource owners, fertiliser producers, traders and farmers benefit to comply with the latest EU policies, which finally allow a harmonised RDF market trade in NWE, contributing further to NWE food supply security.