Agriculture, and in particular livestock, uses nutrients inefficiently, contributing to water and air pollution and global warming. One of the objectives of the Green Deal of the European Commission (EC), through the Farm to Fork strategy, is the reduction of nutrient losses by at least 50% while ensuring the soil fertility. The EC expects that this will reduce the use of fertilisers by at least 20% by 2030. Integrated nutrient management plans will be developed by Member States with the objective of reducing and preventing further pollution from excessive use of fertilisers, while encouraging nutrient recycling from organic waste as fertilisers. At the same time, the EC encourages increasing information to consumers through harmonised labelling and establishes targets to reduce food waste.

Circular Agronomics aims to convert agriculture into a more circular and sustainable sector through short- and long-term measures from practical innovations to costumer awareness and facilitating legislation. With many of the developed innovative solutions a significant reduction of nitrogen emissions, in particular ammonia (NH3), was achieved. Besides, the harmful greenhouse gas (GHG) nitrous oxide (N2O, almost 300 times the Global Warming Potential as carbon dioxide over 100 years) was reduced significantly (e.g. >75 % due to fertiliser reduction in the trials with N efficient genotypes of winter wheat). Results are very promising for a transition to an environment- and climate-friendly agriculture, when farmers are able to invest in such innovations and build up the necessary knowledge. At the same time, consumers need transparent product labelling to make the right decision based on their norms.

This deliverable contains the outcomes of our exploitation task in the project Circular Agronomics. Five technologies, namely solar drying, microfiltration, vacuum degasification, K struvite recovery and membrane treatment had been transferred to a potential replication site and been evaluated under these large-scale conditions. The studies consider a site description, the integration of technology into the site, a cost estimation, a forecast on emissions, legal aspects to be considered and finally some conclusions on roll-out and/or further technology development. To date the technologies reached TRL 6 or 7 and are applied to solid or liquid fraction of agricultural digestate or wastewater and waste streams from food industry. The scale of installations varies from concept studies for a capacity less than 1 m³/h towards 15 m³/h resulting in different cost profiles. A cross-cutting conclusion on different influencing factors such as technology readiness, their environmental benefits, their cost sufficiency and political factors influencing potential replication is delivered. The final paragraph of each concept study concludes with the recommendations for technology provider and or site owner in terms of further development and provides answers about uncertainties in terms of investment decisions. A further synthesis of the main finding of this work will be published in Deliverable 6.9 - a brochure about the technologies.

Circular Agronomics (CA) provides a comprehensive synthesis of practical solutions to improve the current carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus cycling in European agro-ecosystems and related up and downstream processes within the value-chain of food production. CA is a frontrunner project exploiting affordable solutions to meet, among others, the requirements of agriculture, water and waste legislations as well as the EU policy targets regarding emission reduction (mainly NH3, NOx and GHG: CO2, CH4, N2O). The policy analysis contributes to market innovations, to sustainability and European initiatives and finally also to the development of effective joined up policy - further steps towards integrating agriculture in circular economy.