Photos: Forschungszentrum Jülich

The BioRefine Cluster Europe, founded in 2013, networks 21 research projects working on the valorisation of residual flows from agriculture, the agro- and food industry as well as biological waste and waste water. The common goal is that residual and waste flows will no longer pollute the environment but be used as secondary resources. The cluster supports the implementation of the results in practice. Furthermore, the University of Ghent has founded the business development platform "End-of-waste" to initiate collaborations between academia and industry, as well as the scientific network INFINITY, which, for example, offers training modules for doctoral students on the subject of nutrient recycling.

Erik Meers focused in particular on the problem of the shifted global nitrogen cycle. Since the middle of the 20th century, both the use of mineral fertilizers and the combustion of fossil fuels have risen sharply. Both of these factors cause nitrate to be increasingly introduced into the soil and to accumulate through leaching in groundwater, inland waters and finally in the sea, where algae carpets are formed and oxygen deficiency results. He presented some projects from the Biorefine Cluster that address this problem. The SYSTEMIC project is developing new biorefinery systems that make it possible not only to produce biogas from liquid manure, sewage sludge and food residues, but also to recover phosphate and nitrate from the fermentation residues. In the ALG-AD project, fermentation residues from biogas plants are used as a substrate for algae that produce proteins and lipids that can be used for animal feed, for example. The Nutri2Cycle project investigates nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon fluxes and the associated environmental problems in farms throughout Europe that use various farming techniques in order to derive recommendations on how nutrient cycles can be closed more efficiently in the future.