Composting Activities to Recycling Bio-waste for Organic Nutrition, acronym: CARBON

This proposal aims to provide answers to environmental issues regarding disposal of rising amounts oforganic waste (OW) in EU, combining it with the growing request for clean organic fertilizers able tofight against soil fertility depletion for a more sustainable agriculture.About 1.6 billion tonnes yr-1 of OW are produced in the EU (municipal waste, animal sewages, cropresidues, by-products of food processing), and a sensible decrease of OW disposed of to landfills isexpected, set to 50% by 2050 as required by the Directive 1999/31/EC. The production of Wet OrganicFraction (WOF) in Umbria region attains 100K tonnes yr-1, with only a little reuse in the productivechain.EC (COM (2017) 33 final) strongly support the reuse of organic waste "to recycling of bio-waste inorganic-based fertilisers" thereby "turning waste management problems into economic opportunities",enhancing environmental resilience and circular economy in agriculture.Adding Organic Matter (OM) to cultivated soil is believed to help carbon storage, strengthen soilbiodiversity and maintain crop yields (FAO 2017 SOC: the hidden potential) while the decline of soil OM(SOM) in agroforestry sector is considered a pressing topic in EU countries, and a target of the SoilThematic Strategy and related policies; however, bad feeling exists among farmers on the use ofcompost as soil amendment because of previous failed experiences due to unsuitable properties of OWand scarce quality of final compost, especially when derived from unsorted urban waste.In this context, composting may be a valuable strategy for recovery soil fertility when it effectivelyturns bio-waste into "high quality" bio-based fertilizer. While the use of manure as traditional soilimprover is assumed to halve in the 2030 for the average of EU-27, the possible contribution tohumified Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) content has been estimated to duplicate, for both urban-waste andgreen composts, attaining for the 2030 the average European level of 0.4 Mg ha-1 (SOM managementacross the EU -Technical Report -2011-051).Besides, composting OW contributes to the reduction of the green-house gases (GHG) emission; whilethe shift from landfills disposal to composting may not produce a clear measurable drop of GHGemission, soil amendment with stable and mature compost will result in an increase of C and Nstorage. GHG losses from soils had been strongly underestimated so far: the slow time release andextensive nature coupled with the lack of reliable analytical evaluations, resulted in high variability ofestimated fluxes; however, in the past century, the global OC losses from soils may account for136±50 Pg, while the current annual fluxes are rounded up to 1.1 Pg yr-1 (IPCC 2013).The recovery of adequate Organic Carbon (OC) levels in soils is a topical challenge for a sustainabledevelopment of agro-ecosystems, and it appears as real solution against soil desertification occurringin many EU Mediterranean regions. As outlined in recent LIFE meetings on Climate Change adaptation,increasing efforts should be devoted for the adoption of suitable SOM managements aimed to revertthe trend of SOC decline and enhance the potential of cultivated soils to become effective sinks of OC.Both official reports and sectorial studies pointed out that agricultural soils, in either temperate ortropical environments, may store thousands of Mt C year-1, thus turning it in a real sink in the globalOC cycle