Boosting the market deployment of safe, effective and sustainable innovations for soil improvement from bio-waste, towards regenerative soil systems

BIN2BEAN will support cities in their transition towards regenerative soil systems by promoting innovations for soil improvement from bio-waste with a value-based approach. The project will implement 3 Living Labs, as pilot city-regions, to follow a multi-actor and participative approach. In each LL, after mapping local contexts in terms of material and monetary flows, a tailored evaluation framework to demonstrate the safety, environmental and socio-economic performance of soil improvers will be co-designed and implemented, through field testing on experimental sites, feasibility studies and choice experiments. The data obtained will feed into a pilot scoring system, that will be co-developed and validated during the project, to help cities selecting the most effective solutions adapted to the geo-spatial context, i.e. inner city, urban-rural fringe and the wider market. The highest scored solutions will be selected for the development of innovative and tailored business models. The latter will match to stakeholders’ willingness-to-adopt (circular) implementation packages, e.g. collection schemes, cooperation networks, infrastructures and fee structures. The pre-market processes will be monitored through Techno-Economic Assessment (TEA). Finally, based on all previous results, local, national and EU policy roadmaps will be drafted, including waste charging policies and citizen awareness campaigns in the city-region, that will be piloted in LLs. All this will feed into a PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) approach, enabling cities to create a continuous value-based improvement loop towards regenerative soil systems.

BIN2BEAN will support local waste management with the creation of 40 start-ups specialising in the soil improvers value chains. This will help to reach Europe's 2035 objectives of reducing landfill to 10% of total waste while reinjecting nearly 135,000 tonnes of nitrogen and 45,000 tonnes of phosphorus into soils in an environmental, human and sustainable way.