The DeliSoil - Delivering Soil improvers through improved recycling and processing solutions for food industry residues streams project kick-off meeting will be held in Turku, Finland on 27-29 June 2023. The DeliSoil project, funded by Horizon Europe Programme,  will adopt a multi-actor, transdisciplinary approach to co-design processes that minimise food processing waste and valorise its by-products with a circular bioeconomy approach. Applying circular bioeconomy methods to the food industry value chain, improving use of residue streams and regional production of soil improvers will enhance food system sustainability and so reduce waste. DeliSoil’s 5 regional Living Labs (LLs), with actors along the entire food value chain, will use innovative technologies to convert residues from food processing and production industries into tailored soil improvers. Research partners and companies will evaluate the soil improvers and organic fertilisers in state-of-the-art laboratories, and landowners will test the project’s solutions.

ENEA is partner of the DeliSoil project and leader of WP2 “Soil health improvement “that will focus on tailored soil improvers obtained from food processing residue streams and will investigate their ability to enhance and restore soil health and fertility in selected cropping systems. Concrete and knowledge co-creation experiments will be performed using the multi-actor approach to demonstrate and implement use of selected soil improvers in agricultural good practice. ENEA is also involved in all the WPs of the project and will contribute to the design of the regional potential for food-waste recycling and baseline scenario of recycling practices, evaluation of the stability and biosafety assessment of the products (WP1), mapping the potential of EU regions to recycle food processing residue streams as soil improvers and setting-up the procedure to assess quality and stability of generated soil improvers (WP3),  risk assessment and evaluation of environmental benefits of food processing residues processed as organic fertilisers and soil improvers (WP4), identification of stakeholders and social partners along the whole food chain (WP5), and in the dissemination, exploitation and communication activities (WP6).

Link to the project factsheet