How to make a pollutant work for the good of economy
What if one of the Batic Sea’s most problematic pollutants could be turned into an economic resource in the process helping to strengthen Europe’s food security for decades to come, asks Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI).
Phosphorus – a chemical element that is essential for all life on earth. Without it, plants and animals can not grow. Phosphorus has enabled the green revolution in agriculture and underpins our global food security. Without it, modern farming is impossible. But it is a finite resource. The EU imports 90 per cent of the phosphorus it uses in agriculture. And only a small part of it gets recycled.
Phosphorus is not just a resource question. Phosphorus washing into the sea, in urban and industrial wastewater or running off from fields and farms is one of the biggest causes of eutrophication, a problem that has devastated the ecosystems of the Baltic Sea for decades.
The extra phosphorus causes aquatic plants, especially algae, to overgrow, so much that they choke the life around them, until, in the worst cases, the seabed that should be rich with fish becomes a desert, starved of sunlight, oxygen and life, as is the case in the Baltic sea.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
“The status of the Baltic sea, when it comes to eutrophication, is actually, on the one hand, quite improving. So we can see that nutrient runoff from land and from our different sewage treatment plants has been reducing significantly since the 1950’s. But on the other hand, we also have a lot of old sins. We have a lot of nutrients, in particular phosphorus, in the sediments, that have been released there since past use. And we also see a lot of nutrients in the open water body.”
Jakob Granit, Director General of Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management
Sweden works on several levels, when it comes to generating or creating policy mechanisms for reducing the impacts of eutrophication. On the one hand, country needs to have a functioning food system, create opportunities to grow food, and that has an impact on the environment. So in that area, scientists need to find measures on how to have agriculture while reducing the load of nutrients into agriculture production. They also need to find measures to reduce the impact that is take out nutrients from agricultural land. SEI working on both of these aspects at the moment.
The BONUS RETURN project is exploring ways to recycle the phosphorus found in wastewater as well as agricultural wastes. It is about putting it back into the economy instead of letting it harm the Baltic.
Karina Barquet, research fellow SEI, coordinator in Bonus return.
This BONUS RETURN project focus on eco-technologies that reconcile key conflicting challenges inhibiting sustainable development in urban and rural settings within the Baltic Sea Region whilst reducing nutrient enrichment and carbonization in water bodies.
Pilots in Sweden, Finland and Poland are set up to test the most promising eco-technologies identified by the project. Envisaged project outputs include an evidence-based review of eco-technologies; innovative models comprising both nutrient and carbon cycling; sustainability assessments of selected eco-technologies; policy recommendations for promoting the eco-technologies; and market strategies for the most promising eco-technologies.
The good news is that there are plenty of solutions out there. Now it is up to governments, businesses and investors to make sure they get scaled up transforming our phosphorus waste into a sustainable resource.
