Food security of two-thirds of the world s’ population depends on the availability and use of fertilizers. In the transition from a fossil reserve-based to a bio-based economy, it has become a critical challenge to close nutrient cycles and move to a more effective and sustainable resource management, both from an economical and an environmental perspective.
Mineral fertilizers production require significant amounts of fossil energy. Hence, the dependency of agriculture on fossil reserve-based mineral fertilizers (especially nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) must be regarded as a very serious threat to future human food security. On the other hand, estimates of phosphorus reserves expect that depletion will occur within 100 to 300 year, taking into account the current trends on population growth and demand for nutrients. But impacts on the economy are expected to occur much sooner than the time of depletion, because resource scarcity will drive in advance to higher product prices.
At the same time, the agricultural demand for mineral fertilizers is continuously growing, due to a variety of factors, such as the increasing world population, the rising meat consumption, and the cultivation of energy crops. In this sense, the FAO has reported a five-fold increase in fertilizer consumption between 1960 and 2015 and this organization projects a continued increase in the coming years. The tension between offer and demand will continue pushing up the prices for nutrient resources.
Despite these circumstances, large amounts of nutrients are dispersed in the environment every day, in a controlled or uncontrolled way, through the disposal of waste streams. In addition, the intensification of animal production and the resulting manure excesses, combined with a limited availability of arable land for the disposal of waste (manure, sludge, etc.) and the excessive use of chemical mineral fertilizers, has led to surplus fertilization and nutrient accumulation in many soils worldwide. These facts have frequently caused environmental pollution.
As a consequence, it is clear that a new global effort is needed to draw a new scenario where improved nutrient use efficiency and, at the same time, reduced nutrient losses provide the bases for a greener economy to produce more food and energy while reducing environmental impact.
Four are the key points when dealing with nutrients recycling according the scientific community:
– The sustainability of our world depends fundamentally on nutrients. In order to feed 7 billion people, humans have more than doubled global land-based cycling of N and P. – The world’s N and P cycles are now out of balance, causing major environmental, health and economic problems that have received far too little attention. – Insufficient access to nutrients still limits food production and contributes to land degradation in some parts of the world, while finite P reserves represent a potential risk for future global food security, pointing to the need for their prudent use. – Unless action is taken, increases in population and per capita consumption of energy and animal products will exacerbate nutrient losses, pollution levels and land degradation, further threatening the quality of our water, air and soils, affecting climate and biodiversity.
Recycling energy and materials through re-connecting crop and livestock production becomes indispensable for attaining agricultural sustainability in all the senses, not only in the environmental sense. It is time to reconnect nutrient flows between crops production and livestock sectors. To do so, it is needed to invest in agro-industrial processes, which can contribute in the upcycling of mineral nutrients from organic flows towards mineral fertilizer. This approach calls for the further development of a third (after crop and animal production) agro-industrial pillar to be developed in addition to and support of the two existing main pillars of agricultural activity, namely agro-residue processing and upcycling.
Note: this text is part of a contribution of the author to the book “Science, Technology and Innovation for Meeting Sustainable Development Goals” to be published in 2017 by the Colorado State University.
August 8, 2016. 07:00h a.m. Radio turned on driving to work. Headlines begin. “Today is Earth Overshoot Day”, I hear. Oh. Bad news. The Earth Overshoot day in 2016 has been brought forward again.
I’m sure you are wondering about some things right now: 1) If I am able to understand the radio at that time in the morning, 2) Earth Overshoot day? What does it mean?
The answer to the first question is yes. I can understand if radio plays the summer song or the speech is about an environmental issue, in both cases my attention is activated immediately. And the answer to the second question is broader and deeper. I need to enlarge on this problem. Let’s see.
Earth Overshoot concept was originally developed by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) and Earth Overshoot Day is defined as a mark that indicates when humanity has maxed up all the Earth’s resources for the calendar year. Although it is only an estimation, this day is considered the best scientific approach to measure the gap between natural resources generated and destroyed annually, so that, once passed, Earth is operating in overshoot and everything consumed until the end year is supported by resources that planet cannot produce and contaminants that Earth is not able to absorb (www.footprintnetwork.org)..
The simplest example to understand the concept is thinking about Earth´s resources being money in a bank. Overshoot occurs when we withdraw money from the bank faster than to wait for the interest this money generates.
Just as a bank statement tracks income against expenditures, Global Footprint Network is the organization that analyzes thousands of data points and measures humanity’s demand for supply of natural resources and ecological services every year, that is, it compares income of the Earth (which are achieved by increasing the use of renewable energy, for example) against expenses (which are produced, among others, by massive use of private cars overconsuming fuel) and the result of the equation provides the date when humanity exhausts the nature budget for that year so for the rest months, it will maintain by drawing down local resource stocks and accumulating CO2 in the atmosphere, making climatic change worse.
Therefore it’s not a holiday definitively. Earth Overshoot day has moved from the end of October in 1993 to August 13th last year, which means that the deadline was shortened almost a week in 2016. Therefore each year the problem grows worse, if consumption patterns continue apace, it is hard to imagine that the day when we will have spent all the “credit” that exists in this Earth account could come. If we continue to destroy its natural capital and its ability to renew its environmental services, it will be very difficult to avoid it.
In CARTIF, our year already started with environmental purposes and to encourage companies for “funding” to Earth seems to us to be vital because we are in overcapacity nowadays. One of the most interesting ads to do this is the call Spanish CLIMA projects. The Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment (MAGRAMA) launches this call every year and encourages companies to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions with the development of new low carbon activities. It is one of the best funding for those companies that need to receive the last effort to transform their activities towards low carbon technologies, since the MAGRAMA “buys” the CO2 equivalent emissions avoided (expense to Earth eluded), raising the fixed price per tonne each year.
Thus, if you choose to carry out a more environmental process, it will be attractive from the economic point of view and besides, you will contribute to add to the “money box” of the Earth, therefore activities like changing your fossil fuel boilers by other fueled by biomass, transforming your fleet to electric vehicles or using the residual heat of your process, could make an important difference for the future.
Do you dare to bring out the environmental banker in you?
We could read some time ago, as a headline in a national newspaper, that the Chairman of Repsol, Antonio Brufau, literally stated that “It is false that the electric car has zero emissions” and “(…) emissions must take into account not only CO2 emitted by the vehicle, but those produced during manufacture“. With this headline and without realizing, the Chairman of REPSOL was advocating for considering the life cycle of a product to make environmental self-declarations. The fact is that this generalized doubt about the relationship between the electric car and the CO2 cannot lead us to think that it is not one of the most environmental mobility options because it is, what happens is that we should be meticulous when it comes to talk about the environmental performance of products.
One of the first examples of using life-cycle thinking assesment (LCA) in the late 60s, in the USA, when Coca-Cola® decided to explore alternative containers besides the glass bottle through this approach. And this concept arose from a very logical way, due to the emerging companies’ demand for distributing environmental loads, nobody liked being the most pollutant. Companies began to ask about an extended responsibility in this regard and through methodologies such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), one of the most internationally recognized and accepted methods to investigate the environmental performance of products throughout their life cycle, it could be verified that the associated environmental impacts with the manufacturing stage were not the most relevant in some cases.
Let’s see an example to summarize this issue. Imagine a conversation between Mary Ecological and Mary Nosy:
Mary Ecological: “Have you seen the garlands I have placed for the party? they are made of recycled paper because I am an ecological woman, you know“ Mary Nosy: “They are lovely, where did you buy them?” Mary Ecological: “In a Chinese online shop, extremely cheap”
A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) applied to these garlands would probably have confirmed us that Mary Ecological is attributing to herself a label that is not true. To buy a product in China can cause that an item made of recycled paper may have a hidden environmental price that is “disguised” using a more environmentally friendly raw material within the manufacturing process. And from the moment we are free to choose what we buy, as consumers, we are sharing the environmental responsibility with the industry, let´s keep this in mind.
When a company asks for what is the environmental profile of its product and / or process, CARTIF always advises to apply this methodology because the obtained results are a detailed environmental picture of the life cycle of its process, product or service (suppliers included), with the consequent opportunity to identify critical points and reduce costs, both environmental and economic. We have been able to check it many times in many of our projects. It doesn’t matter if we are a consumer or a product manager, to take a life-cycle approach to the environmental impact of the products we are acquiring, producing or selling, is essential to make decisions and to put in clear terms our environmental performance.
For this reason, the Chairman of Repsol said the principle of only considering the stage of use in an electric car to confirm that it does not emit CO2 is incorrect. Although it is perhaps the most significant phase (in fuel-consuming vehicles too), the assessment must be extended to its life cycle which, obviously, includes CO2 emissions from electricity production. Strictly speaking, we should either clarify that the electric vehicle does not emit CO2 during the stage of use or apply the LCA considering its life cycle (CARTIF has already done it) so that, based on the results, to generate environmental headlines.
We love the environmental assessments well done and undertaking rigorous environmental claims. Ask us and we’ll tell you how to do this!
In the first part of this post, we talked about the conclusions we heard in an interesting conference about air quality. After that, we decided two to do two things. On the one hand, to share the figures and conclusions there exposed and on the other hand, to work at self-examination, thinking about our behavior as citizens. What happens when someone asks us if we are willing to use public transport more often? Or to organize ourselves to reduce the number of our daily trips using the private car? We broached the subject of our rights:
• We have a right tobuy wherever we want. We love e-commerce. We are able to buy Chinese oranges on the internet and to ask for bringing them to our home. And if we were not there when company arrives, we are asking for returning another time. To exercise this right involves the use of vans to our home with very low occupancy rates. And not visit the neighborhood greengrocer, of course!
• We have a right to have the car we want, with a good engine and diesel (don’t forget it is cheaper), even for an urban use such as shopping or bringing children to school
• We have a right tomove anywhere within the urban public space. We intend to arrive to the center of our city driving and to find available parkings there. It is better than largest urban parks.
• We have a right to choose where to live and normally, we prefer the suburbs, with good quality of life (and good air). Moreover, we are moving with our private car whenever necessary, regardless of the reason. And of course, being the only occupant of our vehicle.
• We have a right to have public transport, anywhere and at any time, although sometimes the transports are running practically empty at certain periods.
• We have a right not to meet delivery vans in the middle of the street and we agree on the fact that Authorities restrict the time in which they are able to circulate through the city center. This means that companies have to increase their fleet with vans with poorer quality in order to have more available units and, consequently, to ensure orders. Including our oranges.
• We have a right to have dumpsters on our doorstep, with frequent domestic rubbish collection. If we do not check that truck passes several times a day, we are complaining.
• We have a right to review our vehicles periodically, but we order to companies which carry out the compulsory vehicle tests not take too long in the review and not to be expensive. Implementing appropriate control systems for detecting “big high-polluting cars” would require longer reviews and a higher price.
We are sure that you have ever used these rights to defend your comfort zone but, in CARTIF, we are convinced too that, with a little effort, we could change our habits by more sustainably customs. We know that awareness always takes time, but the same situation happened when the waste separation was legislated or when smoking in public places was banned, and both or them are now fully integrated into our daily practices.
For this reason, we are asking the authorities to let experts advise them both for implementing more measures to encourage sustainable behaviors and to penalize those which are damaging in excess. That is, we should support to have a little less of “individual freedom” in order to have a better air quality.
Because with the use of “our rights” what we are really doing is limiting the freedom of others. The elderly, children or people with respiratory diseases are risk groups and their health largely depends on the quality of the air they breathe.
Miguel de Cervantes wrote in his work Don Quixote: “Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts that heaven has bestowed upon men; no treasures that the earth holds buried or the sea conceals can compare with it; for freedom, as for honour, life may and should be ventured (…) “.
We are not angry, of course, what really happens is that air quality issue concerns us greatly in CARTIF. A few weeks ago, we attended a workshop entitled “Technical solutions for reducing emissions from mobility“, held in MAGRAMA (Spanish Ministry). The panel of speakers was made up of a related group of professionals from the mobility sector, in its broadest sense, and all of them exposed several experiences, technical solutions, problems and challenges for the future.
As we drew some conclusions and we heard data which need to be shouted from every corner (although they may irritate us!), we are inaugurating, with this blog post, a series where we are telling you what was said there (part I) to question our rights as citizens (part II) … is our well-being real?
Let’s start from the beginning. The conference opened with a kindly reminder to the assistants about the effects of poor urban air quality. This problem was the common theme of the entire workshop because it is a topic that cannot be forgotten, it concerns our health. Look at these figures: 33,200 people died because of urban air quality effects in Spain in 2013 (390,419 was the total) and 491,000 died prematurely in the EU-28.
With such a strong beginning, and without forgetting there is no exaggeration in these data, we are telling you some considerations:
1.Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMP) are being implemented in cities with the aim of improving mobility and make it more sustainable, or what would be the same, reducing individual transportation by internal combustion engine cars. At this point, the conclusion was unanimous, it should be asked to the municipalities to try to be more ambitious in their actions and one of the main axes of their policy should be to improve urban air quality. It seems clear that necessary management measures will be needed fundamentally. Do you know one of the recent initiatives of the Mayor of London? We love it.
2. It seems clear that new technologies in traffic management as long as to encourage car-sharing will be a help for mobility problems, but their actual impact is very limited. Let’s legislate them for the good of all.
3.Volkswagen emissions scandal was mentioned, of course. It was said that automotive industry has developed important improvements on vehicles during recent years, which have led to significant reductions in fuel consumptions and pollutant emissions (without addressing irregularities thereon). Nevertheless, improvements are still needed.
4. Up to now and according to sales figures, technologies for vehicles and alternative fuels cannot compete without economic incentives against the conventional ones. Once more, to promote Research and Development may be the key factor to achieve it.
5. Greater control over the actual condition of the vehicles and the identification of “big high-polluting cars” are necessary. During the conference, it was mentioned that there are already clear publications showing that a relatively small percentage of vehicles would be responsible for high rates of pollutants emissions, and not only among the oldest ones.
We know that to keep citizens calm is the main objective during this kind of formal conferences but, from our point of view, it should be more taxative and make clear that vehicles combustion engines and heatings mainly cause urban air pollution. And this issue leads us directly to the analysis of citizens’ daily activities.
“What is the weather like this weekend?”. We ask every week when Friday comes. “Sunny, but we can’t trust on weather” answers our colleague. “You’re right! It’s the climate change fault” both conclude.
In our previous posts, you have been able to know how CARTIF is working to help to mitigate climate change, through the development of new technologies and awareness. And let’s say that, if climate change is responsible even for our change of plans during the weekend, it’s time to know it a little better, to talk about when and by whom was discovered.
Eduard Punset has written an excellent introduction to this issue in his latest book and we have collected here an excerpt:
“The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1995 was awarded jointly to Paul J. Crutzen (Dutch), Mario J. Molina (Mexican) and F. Sherwood Rowland (American), to warn the world of a thinning of the ozone layer surrounding the Earth, between twenty and fifty kilometers above our heads (…). They showed, to the disbelief of many people, that the Earth’s ozone layer was thinning in the region of the poles, especially in the South, over Antarctica, and the cause of this degradation was some gases that don’t exist in nature but, after their discovery, in the early twentieth century, were widely used in the industry as refrigerants and propellants (in aerosol). They are the chlorofluorocarbon gases, also commonly known as CFCs, included in many normal household items like in refrigerators, spray deodorants etc … What Nobel laureates discovered was that, despite being harmless to human health, these gases are so stable and stay in the atmosphere for very long times, long enough to reach the upper atmosphere, where UVB photons turn them into highly reactant catalysts. Ozone depletion is caused by the products of those processes” (extract from Carta a mis nietas: todo lo que he aprendido y me ha conmovido. Eduard Punset, 2015, published by Destino, in Spanish).
And although the alert came in 1974, yet it took a few years for society to become aware of the problemand to increase the knowledge about the possible greenhouse gases. Let’s look back to history.
It’s in Rio de Janeiro, in 1992, where countries joined an international treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, a frame for international cooperation that outlines how specific international treaties may be negotiated to set binding limits on greenhouse gases.
Three years later, the first Conference of the Parties (COP1) was held in Berlin and in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in Kyoto, in Japan, with the aim of providing policies and measuring plans for industrialized countries, to reduce emissions by 5 % in the period 2008-2012. In 1999, 84 Parties signed the Kyoto Protocol but to enter into force, the Protocol must be ratified, and this fact was a problem because there was no agreement on how to apply the rules. In 2001, George W. Bush announced that the United States of America was no longer intending to comply with the objectives set out in the Protocol and in 2005, it entered into force without the signature of USA and China, the world’s largest carbon polluters.
But it was necessary to keep on working and the COP15 arrived, in Copenhagen in 2009, a crucial event in the negotiating process, remembered as unsuccessful because it was closed with a minimal agreement that did not commit countries. It was in Doha, in 2012, where a new timetable to reach an effective universal climate agreement was set out, choosing 2015 as the deadline. And with this purpose, COP21 took place last December, in Paris, and it has been the first time that a legally binding and a universal agreement on climate have been achieved, with the aim of limiting their emissions.
“Never too late to do well”, says a Spanish proverb, so we are confident that a successful chapter has begun in climate change history. Let’s cross our fingers.
