3R Project cooperations

FER-PLAY is facilitating the uptake of alternative innovative fertilisers and aims to gather, harmonise, select and complement the knowledge on alternative fertiliser value chains, and promote the wide-scale production and application of those that have best environmental, social and economic performance, as well as technical and regulatory viability. Conventional fertilisers are finite, often imported, resources and employing energy-intensive/polluting production processes. To ensure high yields, these fertilisers are optimised for the fast release of nutrients, making them an attractive choice for farmers but a threat to soil and ecosystem health. In this context nutrient use efficiency of the mineral fertilizers are rather low while their negative environmental impacts are high. For ex. the nutrient use efficiency  of the chemo-synthetic mineral phosphates and the untreated/fine ground soft rock phosphate is as low as 17 %, while 83% is impacted as soil/ground water pollution, including discharge of the toxic Cadmium/Uranium that enter the food chain.