On Wednesday 15th March 2023, these three Horizon Europe projects: GOLD, Phy2Climate, & CERESiS came together to present in a webinar, with over 100 participates, dedicated to the phytoremediation aspects of the projects.
All three projects took part in the same call to achieve ‘Combined clean biofuel production and phytoremediation solutions from contaminated lands worldwide’. Dedicated biofuel production at large scale depends on sustainable land availability that does not compete with other uses. Phytoremediation is a holistic approach that has the potential to manage land contaminated with a wide range of pollutants. Therefore the challenge faced by all three projects is to bridge the gap between phytoremediation strategies and clean biofuel production in a sustainable and optimum manner that will overcome the indirect land use change (iLUC) issue for biofuels and restore lands for agricultural uses.
The first step in bridging the gap is by determining the best energy crops to grow on contaminated soil, that will not only facilitate the remediation of the soils but will also provide the highest yield of feedstock for producing liquid biofuels. All three projects have now completed at least one year of field trials, on low iLUC lands, all around the world, and in this webinar we hear how successful the phytoremediation part of the research has been.
The agenda followed this running order:
- GOLD: Eleni G. Papazoglou, Agricultural University of Athens
7 sites – Greece, France, Poland, China, Italy
- Phy2Climate: Alfreda Kasiuliene, Biovala
4 sites – Spain, Serbia, Lithuania, Argentina
- CERESiS: Richard Lord, University of Strathclyde
- sites – Brazil, UK, Ukraine, Italy
The presentations concluded with a substantial and interesting round table discussion chaired byMarkus Puschenreiter, Institute for Soil Research, University of Vienna, Austria.
The full recording can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/XUxklfhfPoU
And the presentation slides here:
