In rural British Columbia, Catalyst Agri-Innovations Society is harnessing the power of poop.

ABBOTSFORD, BRITISH COLUMBIA—

It takes no more than an Uber ride with the window down across Abbotsford, B.C. to notice that you are in Canada’s agricultural capital. The scent of Cedar and Spruce that envelops most of the Fraser Valley, the Southwestern region of British Columbia that neighbors Washington State, is overpowered by the farm smells of wheat, fresh grass and, especially, cow feed—in all parts of its cycle.

The odor of cow manure grows faint to new visitors after a few days, and some locals don’t detect it at all, but, despite living in the area for years, Chris Bush couldn’t leave it alone. That odor was a sign of a problem with local agriculture; one he wondered if he could fix.

Back then, he was an account manager losing interest in his job selling two-way radios at a regional telecom company. One night, trying to disconnect from work, he read a sidebar story in Popular Science Magazine about a farm in Vermont that made electricity from cow manure—the same dung he’d get a faint whiff of every morning on his drive to work. A lightbulb turned on in his mind.

“We have massive amounts of manure lying around, and our environment is suffering from it,” he says. “It seemed to me like there was a gigantic gap between what is being done and what’s possible here in Abbotsford.”

Bush was right. The chickens and cows of the province of British Columbia produce nearly three billion kilograms of manure every year: about enough to fill a full-sized American football stadium to its top. And Abbotsford, with its 25,000 cows and nine million chickens, produced far more waste than the city of 160,000 people could handle. Much of it would get shipped to the prairies as fertilizer or, worse, dumped in abundance on local crops and nearby rivers, filling the soil, air, and water with methane: a compound that, liter for liter, traps 80 times more heat in our atmosphere than the carbon dioxide puffing from our car exhausts. Cow waste would even trickle down the Abbotsford aquifer and flow downstream towards Washington State at a rate that made American farmers complain about their up-north neighbors. Abbotsford had a manure problem, and Bush wanted to deal with it.

He wondered if there was a way to make good use of all that manure. It was a prescient thought: recycling on-site farm waste would only become a more relevant global challenge in the 15 years to come. The nitrogen fertilizer used by many farmers then and now—the kind that tripled global grain production over the last 50 years—continues to dwindle in its supply, even before supplies from Russia became squeezed by the war. Couple a worldwide fertilizer shortage with a supply chain still wobbly from the pandemic, and you get expensive and scarce food for plants and, in consequence, smaller crop sizes. 

Bush was fascinated by how some small farms fermented their manure and transformed it into fertilizer, all while capturing the methane in the waste and using it to power their homes. But many of these farms did so in isolation. He wondered if he could find a way to scale the transformation of manure into gas and fertilizer, to serve many farms at once.

The key to his dream was something called a biogas plant, which is a network of oxygen-free tanks called anaerobic digesters that take in manure and ferment it at nearly 40 degrees Celsius for three to four weeks. The process replicates what happens in a cow’s third stomach: the manure separates into solid and gas. When that happens in the stomach of a cow, it farts. A biogas plant, in contrast, turns that gas into usable fuel and funnels it into the power grid. And as a bonus: the solid that remains is odorless and can be used as fertilizer for crops.

Some farms in British Columbia were using small biogas plants, and the technology was particularly strong in Europe. But to do this on a grander scale, he would need to build an industrial-sized biogas plant. The price tag: around $6 million. He needed to win over his neighbors, some of whom were worried about the smell or traffic. More than anything, though, he needed investors, but the idea was so new in the mid-aughts that there wasn’t even terminology for the kind of zero-carbon farming he was contemplating.

“Back then, nobody had the sexy language,” says Bush. “I’d tell people I want to power the city with cow poop, and they’d look at me like I was a nutjob.”

Still, Bush could not shake the idea. So, in the wake of the 2008 recession, he sold the family home and moved with his wife, eight-year-old twin boys, and six-year-old daughter to East Abbotsford. With the remaining equity from his house, his entire savings of $500,000, and $4 million in research grants and investor money that he finally tracked down, he built a farm and a biogas plant, with the goal of powering community homes with Abbotsford’s abundance of manure.

“We had planned another baby, but went for the anaerobic digester instead… we even had a picture of it next to those of the kids on our fridge,” he says. “We put everything into this.”

Bush’s initial results, especially for an ex-telecom specialist, were auspicious. It took him barely two years to build a working biogas plant, capture energy from cow droppings and convert it to electricity. In 2010, his plant became the first in North America to extract gas from cow manure and sell it to utility from a farm—the 126^th plant on earth to do so, he says with a grin.

What would eventually make his plant special, he thought, was scale. Many biogas systems across the world already produced enough energy to sustain themselves. Bush had a grander idea: what if he eventually developed a biogas plant that could power an entire community? Arguably, no country needed this technology more than Canada, one of the top manure-producing countries in the world, without a blueprint to dispose of it in an environmentally friendly way.

The investment was huge, but the finances appeared simple: he had to produce $2,500 of gas per day for six months to break even. Any profits would go toward funding his brainchild, the Catalyst Agri-Innovations Society: a consortium of people dedicated to advancing the environmental and economic sustainability of agriculture, hopefully, one day based in a research and innovation center.

But his operation soon struggled: in the first 18 months, it averaged only $1,000 in profits per day. People were not buying the gas; machines would often break and need repair; and Bush, experimenting with cow, hog, and chicken manure, was still far away from nailing the recipe for maximum gas production.

“Every month, I’d sell off a little more to my investor group to keep the plant going, and then when I ran out of shares to sell, I had to sell the plant. Financially, it was catastrophic for me… I was broken when it died.”

A former business partner bought the biogas plant from Bush in 2012, giving the then demoralized 40-year-old the chance to cleanly exit the farming world and start fresh. But Bush found himself unable to walk away from his goal: he figured his idea was the right one, but that it just needed better execution.

“I recognized I am an addict to this vision. I mean, I had already sold the house,” he says.

“It had become more important for me that the project worked than that economically I survived. We need this. The world needs this.”

Now, 15 years after reading the Popular Science Magazine sidebar, and ten years after losing much of his life’s savings, Bush remains at work, and the Catalyst Agri-Innovations Society is alive as a four-person operation.

On most days, Bush drives ten minutes westbound from the home he now rents with his wife to the Bakerview Farm Eco-dairy, a small dairy farm with a biogas plant that he and his team now use as a research headquarters. The parking lot there is full of families, gathered around the front-facing on-site ice cream shop.

“The front end is what pulls the people in. Us,” he says with a slight smile, “we work at the back end.”

Behind the ice cream shop is a modest-looking collection of barns engulfed in a scent of manure that penetrates even the hardened nostrils of any local Abbotsfordian. A blue-grey barn on the right houses 50 cows, each with a yellow name tag on their right ear. Colleen, Alexis, Daffodil, and their contemporaries all face away from a dung-caked pit lined with a steel trough, which carries the fresh cow waste outside towards a network of bungalow-sized barns and trailers.

“You have to follow the poop to see the magic,” says Bush.

The eco-dairy is more eco than dairy: the buildings behind the cow barn hide the biggest active anaerobic digestion facility in all of Canada. Trailers propped up on two-foot stilts and packed with scientific equipment.

Those trailers contain $5M CAD ($3.8M USD) worth of equipment: 15 half-liter bottles connected to a chromatograph and monitor, eight 20-liter vats kept inside cupboards, two cylindrical 400-liter anaerobic digesters lining the walls, and six 1500-liter digesters kept inside a 38-degree fermentation room in the back. In its own barn is one big horizontal 85,000-liter digester that Bush calls Bertha.

Each container is filled with a fermenting, charcoal-colored manure mixture—roughly three parts cow, chicken, and hog excrement, and one-part industrial food processing waste—Bush calls it poop soup.

The machines take 25 days to digest the mix and funnel its gas into the utility grid. Ultimately the gas powers 1000 homes and businesses across the province. The manure, meanwhile, after it gets stripped of its methane, becomes environmentally-friendly fertilizer for nearby crops.

Bush is no longer solo on his mission to make waste less wasteful: he has teamed up with James Irwin, a serial entrepreneur, bio-chemist, and CEO of the agricultural research corporation Point 3 Biotech Corp. Before joining forces with Bush, Irwin used anaerobic digestion on microalgae to extract astaxanthin, an antioxidant with a red pigment that he yielded so purely it would sometimes come out as purple.

“A few people said, hey, you’re like the Walter White of Precision Agriculture,” says Irwin, “because of the blue meth, or whatever. I don’t know—I’ve never watched the show.”

Irwin had also used anaerobic digestion on microalgae to make biodiesel, and later to convert fats from agricultural waste into renewable natural gas. Bush wondered if the scientist’s expertise in collecting usable gas from organic materials would complement his own goals. So, they became business partners.

“Chris is the visionary at Catalyst, and I bring the research,” says Irwin. “He is building the car, and I’m assembling the pieces.”

The team expanded again in the last three years by hiring lab technician Travis Scott, and principal investigator Suman Adhikary, then a Concordia master’s graduate and previously a lecturer at Sonargaon University in Bangladesh. Adhikary’s job, complex in application, sounds simple in theory: create the best manure recipe for gas production.

“Now we try a bunch of recipes to put in the digesters,” says Adhikary. “Sometimes it’s half-chicken with 20 percent cow and hog. Sometimes it’s less chicken because too much chicken manure produces enough ammonia to inhibit methane production. Sometimes it’s mostly cow… we’re still tinkering.”

Adhikary and the team iterate their mixture based on their own findings and the outcomes that emerge from European plants. Bush has traveled overseas to consult with his Swedish and German counterparts about their own mixtures of choice and is closely following new work from Germany that uses green hydrogen to convert carbon dioxide into methane and increase the overall gas yield from digesters.

While Catalyst primarily uses the plant for research, it is still performing much better than Bush’s first iteration.

 “It’s simple: more gas, more money, and this plant is making $5,000 a day,” he says.
 “Financially, though, we still haven’t recovered from 2012.”

The final part of Bush’s vision requires a little collaboration with the neighbors. The team at Catalyst has an idea of converting their demonstrative research project into a community-scale manure management initiative, in which they would have large community biogas plants built to digest and ferment manure of several local farms. The plants would be co-owned: Catalyst would be responsible for their maintenance and upgrades, while the farmers would operate the machine. Bush figures such partnerships would be win-win-wins: farmers who face increasing pressure to restrict their environmental damage would receive professional help in mitigating their footprint, Catalyst would grow its business, and ultimately, Mother Nature would benefit, too.

“That way, farmers don’t have to go into it blindly and risk building a biogas plant by themselves—I know what that’s like,” says Bush. “Here, we’d both share the risk and the reward.”

It’s easy to get local farmers and businesses to buy into small-scale collaborations, like collecting grains from local breweries to feed cows, which Bush does regularly. But the bigger ideas, like powering your home with gas from animal waste, or convincing a farmer to build a multi-million-dollar anaerobic digester on their farm, tend not to be as easily adopted. Resistance to change is the biggest hurdle Bush’s ideas continue to face.

“When it comes to innovations in agriculture, the potential users need to be sure whatever is new is bulletproof before they make a move,” says Mike Manion, an executive in residence with agri-business accelerator IAFBC Agri business accelerator. “Change, without years of investigation and proof that it works, can make farmers fearful.”

But the province’s farming industry, according to experts, is in dire need of fixing. The Canadian federal government announced in July it was looking for ways to cut fertilizer emissions by 30 percent by 2030. Local fertilizer is already running low. The pandemic and extreme weather of the last few years, which included record-breaking forest fires and destructive floods, compromised common supply chains with the prairies and California, and made fertilizer prices in the province skyrocket, says Lenore Newman, Director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley.

“As a result, we’re in unprecedented territory in food loss in B.C. and in Canada: last winter, across the province, we had no lettuce on our shelves,” she says. “The only way we can ensure there is food security here is to produce domestically, more intensively, and year-round.”

For those reasons, using local waste to grow more crops without spewing methane into the air could become paramount. Couple that with a provincial renewable gas subsidy program for B.C. residents to power their homes with biogas, and it would seem that the technology’s moment has arrived.

“At all levels of new farming tech, it takes that sort of government push to see progress,” says Manion. “I keep trying to encourage Chris, because his ideas were about 15 years ahead of the curve, and now the environment is different out there… people just might start paying more attention to his work.”

Manion sees the immediate importance of in-house manure fermentation: making one’s own fertilizer can help protect against global supply issues. But there are still only three working digesters in all of B.C. For the technology to become mainstream, it must first become cheaper and adopted by more trailblazers. If the research efforts at Catalyst lead to installing more industrial-sized, trusted, affordable biogas plants on nearby farms, it could open the floodgates.

“We need solutions to make home-grown fertilizer,” he says. “Agriculture is at a precipice—a turning point—and they might just be at the forefront of it.”

Thirty minutes inland from Abbotsford and the Bakerview eco-dairy, in the mountainside agricultural city of Chilliwack, is a massive construction site that is slowly developing the largest biogas plant in Canada. Once ready, the plant is expected to produce enough energy from manure to power approximately 4,000 homes, and also to recover nine million gallons of water per year from manure remnants via reverse osmosis and mineral rebalancing. Once operational, it will dwarf Bush’s research facility in gas production.

The $40-million CAD ($30.5M USD) project was just an idea in George Dick’s mind back in 2008, when the entrepreneur and dairy farmer at Dicklands Farms came across a magazine article about Bush’s own biogas project.

“I thought, where did this guy come from? We have the same idea!” says Dick. “And he’s going through with it.”

Dick paid close attention to Bush’s trailblazing attempt to build a plant in the early 2010s, and witnessed the project’s first iteration bleed money and go out of business.

“I saw Chris fail… it was such a new technology, and we knew even less about it then than we do now,” says Dick. “Someone had to take those first steps forward, even if they were risky.”

After a decade of research, fundraising, and building, Dick is now months away from seeing his own years-long project come to life: the Dicklands Farms biogas plant is expected to be up and running by April 2023. If the plant functions as expected, it may be Dick, and not Bush, that will be remembered as the father of biogas in British Columbia, and possibly in Canada.

“The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese,” says Bush. “Sometimes that’s the price of going first.”

But to Bush, a successful outcome at Dicklands Farms would feel like a win nonetheless. He wants he and his partners at Catalyst to pioneer research into biogas farming and scale their own operation, but more than anything, he wants his city’s manure problem to be solved. Whether he is the face of the movement or the shoulders on which another innovator will stand, he longs to see the vision that pulled him away from his regular life materialize.

Besides, he says, the stakes are higher than personal glory.

 “More than anything, this is about a mission: powering the world and solving one of the grand challenges of humanity,” he says.

“I’ll be the guy to lead it, or I’ll be a soldier on somebody else’s team. Either way, I’m calling this my life’s work.”

More on Catalyst Agri-Innovations Society

So much of American life can be improved by reducing food waste. ReFED can help.

TRUCKEE, CALIFORNIA, USA

Dana Gunders is groan-laughing, despite herself. For the last hour, the conversation in a Truckee, California, grocery store café lounge has focused on the impact of food waste on human beings and our environment, “food waste” appearing at first blush to be a mild, if approachable term for a few ingredients not making it into a dinner recipe at their peak. In fact, food waste refers to a massive systemic issue across every aspect of how we make, transport, buy, prepare, and dispose of food and its byproducts. Gunders, as executive director of ReFED, the leading nonprofit in this arena, is constantly thinking about the food we don’t eat: the produce that rots in fields unharvested or in transport to point of sale, the bulk purchases that expire in hotel and restaurant walk-ins, the ugly fruit at the farmer’s market that never gets chosen, the government-mandated portions in school lunches that may not be a fit for your 8-year-old’s appetite.

How to talk about food waste, it turns out, is a major part of resolving a crisis that denies access that millions of people could have to affordable healthy food, contributes to high quantities of greenhouse emissions, and increases the cost of food overall. And so, if there is anything funny to be said about food waste, it’s that the term doesn’t convey the scope of the challenge. “It’s a terrible term,” Gunders says, her laugh extending into a sigh as she slides the base of her palm across her eyelids. “People understand it very quickly, though not always correctly.”

It could be said that the United States has consistently struggled to manage its food system effectively and consistently. In 2021, as one marker, more than ten percent of Americans (13.5 million households) weren’t sure whether they’d have food on a given day. And yet, the U.S. tosses out about 35% of its food supply, or about 80 million tons, a number that Gunders describes as “ridiculous.” She considers other terms: “We talk about ‘surplus food’ a lot because it’s not waste until you waste it, right? What we really want is for there to be less surplus in the first place, and then for it not to go to waste.”

The good news about food waste is that, at least by Gunders’ standards, nobody wakes up committed to throwing food away. In a society where the bottom lines are treated as gospel, no business wants to buy food unnecessarily and have it not be consumed. Since its beginnings seven years ago, ReFED has been the sole national nonprofit dedicated to significantly reducing food waste, with aims to cut that 80 million ton in half by 2030. This won’t just save food, it could limit global warming and remake the food system into something far more inclusive and not inherently mired in systemic injustices.

To study food waste is to realize how it touches, and is touched by, every part of our lives.

From data to action

ReFED first formed in 2015, but its history really started with a foundational report that came a year later: the 2016 Roadmap to Reduce U.S. Food Waste by 20 Percent. It was part analysis, part action plan, and part acknowledgment of the severity of the issue. “It’s really about examining the food system to understand where waste is designed into it,” Gunders said. “And how do we find ways to design it out?”

It also introduced one of the core creative tensions facing the organization: how to produce data, great data even, but always with an eye on making sure that data translates into action. “Lord knows we don’t want to sit around and create reports that sit on shelves and nobody uses,” says Gunders. “Our ultimate goal is to have people do stuff with that information.”

First things first. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”, as Gunders puts it, so the organization compiled data sets and built an open-source data and insights engine. A robust toolkit that’s been used by government agencies, retailers, farmers, and many other stakeholders, the engine allows users to discover what actual documented issues currently exist, to research existing solutions and providers working on those issues now, and to calculate what impact those efforts may have.

One key action it’s meant to spur is donation. Impact investors, notably Jesse Fink, the founder of Priceline, were at the heart of the organization’s founding. Current funders include huge corporations and foundations like General Mills, Hellmann’s, Deloitte, and the Walmart Foundation. That insights engine? Sponsored by the Kroger Co. Zero Hunger | Zero Waste Foundation. This June’s announcement that ReFED would help launch the $100M Circular Food Solutions Funding Platform was the culmination of years of efforts to build structures around how they channel money.

“Anyone who’s interested in this topic, anyone who’s a funder, can participate in education and deal flow,” says Gunders. “And anytime an organization is looking for money, we put that on a list and send it out to all of these groups and it helps kind of grease the wheels of the whole system.”

Emily Broad Leib, Founding Director of the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic, says ReFED is a critical platform for everyone interested in attacking this problem. “ReFED is really at the center of building that ecosystem, of maintaining that network, and keeping all the other stakeholders engaged,” she says. “They’re the group that’s field-building, the hub for all the spokes in this issue.”

Leib helps maintain the policy finder for ReFED, in part because the ReFED site is the most visible space in the food waste community, a digital watering hole for powerful groups who want to help and groups on the ground who are already helping.

So despite their relatively small size—just 20 employees—ReFED seems well positioned to effect change throughout the entire food system. Which would be nice, since, well, the system is so convoluted, so far from ideal. Take, for example, food waste and hunger. Right now, food banks, soup kitchens and churches rely heavily on food donations to feed those who are food insecure, a group that disproportionately comprises communities of color. So food waste… fights hunger?

“If I were going to design the food system from scratch,” says Gunders. “I would not design it so that the way we feed people who can’t feed themselves is to just over-buy and over-consume and then [donate the food] later in its life… what we really want is a food system that’s so efficient that we don’t have that surplus. And acknowledge that it is our social responsibility to have everyone in our country fed.”

She describes meeting a leader in food surplus issues in the Netherlands who was perplexed even at the idea of donating large amounts of uneaten food. There simply aren’t enough hungry mouths to feed in a country that prioritizes feeding the poor. So instead, they can focus sharply on reducing surplus without worrying about downstream impacts on hunger.

But that is the Netherlands. In the United States, tackling food waste can involve a very delicate political and economic dance. Gunders recently testified in front of Congress and says that Michelle Obama’s 2012 school lunch guidelines came up, once again. The familiar talking point was that anyone who put more fresh vegetables in school lunches must not be against food waste, since children just throw the vegetables out. “It’s not okay to use waste as this argument against feeding people well,” says Gunders. “How about this: make the food taste better.”

For all the institutional and financial muscle of ReFED, though, one of their greatest assets is the understanding that big fixes in food waste sometimes start small. Yes, there are large-scale packaging solutions, and more private sector technology deployed against food waste than ever (food waste tech companies raised $1.9B in 2021, shattering old records). But according to Harvard’s Leib, small-scale, sometimes even personal, solutions are key.

“The actual process of addressing food waste happens at a local scale,” Leib says. “If we want to meet the 2030 goal of reducing food waste by 50%, we’re not going to get there unless we leverage what other people are doing on the ground. Some solutions are low-tech, and for those it’s about getting the message out. Otherwise, you’re just reinventing the wheel throughout the country.”

As Gunders puts it, ReFED is by design very “manual” on the solutions side. “We’re just reaching out as we hear about cool things that people are doing or cool companies or cool nonprofits that are doing something in this space,” she says. “Then we extrapolate from there: if scaled up, this could actually save, for example, 40 tons of food across the country and here’s how much it would cost to do it, and here’s how many greenhouse gases would be saved… it’s all a model we’re estimating, but we’re trying to paint some kind of picture to help people prioritize what they can do.”

Individual choice is also a confounding factor. Gunders says her favorite stat comes from a survey that found that 75% of Americans waste less food than the average American. That is, people always underestimate how much food they themselves waste. What they don’t realize is that small choices, such as putting out an overabundance of food at a house party, may make them feel good, may even be key to their self-identity as good hosts, but should be viewed also in light of food waste. Your individual desire to not leave any guest potentially hungry is closely related to desire that shoppers have to see supermarket shelves always full, even if that means guaranteed food waste or the resulting higher prices. Expectations and behavior alike need to readjusting, starting with each consumer.

Leib says that’s why the scaling up of all these smaller solutions is so key. “We’ve already seen a lot of preliminary successes coming from ReFED’s work,” she says. “But into the future, the change needs to be exponential.” In a world where food waste is responsible for 8-10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, she says, solutions both big and small need to be expanded as rapidly as possible.

A dream in DC

When the pandemic took root in the U.S. in early 2020, it exposed the vulnerabilities of the American food system—from indefinitely delayed supply chains to forced closures of business that serve or store food, which led to massive losses. ReFED saw an opportunity to create a rapid response fund to get money flowing to organizations already engaged with those communities most affected, ultimately delivering more than $3.5 million to 37 for-profit and nonprofit organizations. The effort helped to collectively keep more than 50 million pounds from being wasted during a critical period of the pandemic. In Washington, D.C, one such organization is Dreaming Out Loud (DOL), which was able to make 70,000 meals and deliver groceries to 1,300 recipients each week through November 2020 thanks to fund resources provided by ReFED.

When Taylor Lewis began at DOL in February of this year, he was tasked with managing the Farm at Kelly Miller, a two-acre urban space atop a grassy hill, tucked behind a middle school in Washington D.C.’s Ward 7. His first mandate: to assess the site’s operations and workflows as the farm had become a beacon of community engagement since his employer launched it in 2018. Amid cordoned off row crops, in-progress digging, irrigation installation, a slew of raised beds, and a compost area, the farm produces fruits, veggies, and herbs to stock DOL’s aggregated farm-share, wholesale markets, and “U-Picks,” where community members of all ages harvest their own goods.

The Kelly Miller property would be Lewis’s first urban farming experience after five years tilling soil, two of them in a rural village in Ghana living with expat friends following a turn in the U.S. Navy. Suddenly Lewis found himself forced to live off the land in ways he hadn’t previously thought about. “For the first time I experienced what it meant to truly reap what you sow,” he said, seated underneath a shady tent one July morning. “You put a single seed in the ground, and it produces pounds of food. I felt fulfilled. I got into a more organic or natural rhythm of doing things and I realized this was something I might be doing for the rest of my life.”

DOL builds community-driven food systems through not only cooperatively supplying healthy foods targeted toward those who are most likely to be exposed to systemic harm, but by creating economically viable opportunities within the food system for those same residents. When Christopher Bradshaw founded the organization in 2008, it was with a clear eye on how food has been politicized in the D.C. Metro area, which is to say, the United States.

To understand the mechanisms of how food as a business operates in the U.S. is to understand that this country has never embraced the responsibility of feeding its people—all of its people. From forcibly removing indigenous peoples off of ancestral land in their care, and owing to an agricultural legacy born out of slavery, food was not intended to ensure a country’s inhabitants receive nourishment or delight in pleasure. Rather, food became incentive to expand territories and acted as fuel to extract maximum results from a disposable labor pool robbed of their identities. The social caste hierarchy rooted in the eras of western expansion and enslavement is apparent in the weaponizing of food that brings us through the 21^st century: the eradication of indigenous methods of tending to the land as the government pushed Native people to reservations; sharecropping where Black Americans were trapped in cycles of debt and access to food was restricted often to counter efforts to vote; the abuse of migrant farm laborers, many hailing from Central and South America, and the growing doom of food apartheid, the accurate term for what is often misnamed “food deserts,” where folks who are systemically blocked from living in certain areas find themselves miles away from grocers with healthy, appealing options.

DOL assessed the results of this brutal history and envisioned a path toward food security, including teaching urban agriculture skills to residents made vulnerable by these systemic issues. For that to happen, they would need to shepherd farmers, makers, and sellers into an integrated and transparent process that maximizes their effort and limits unnecessary losses. One way to do this is to aggregate produce from smaller farmers in the region to sell wholesale, distribute through the CSA, and retail at their markets. Or pre-purchasing from such farmers, which provides sustainability, lowers the farmer’s operating costs, and prevents them having to add labor to the retail side of their business. Without DOL, most of those farmers would not be able to produce enough food to make the investment worthwhile, or they would get stymied by frustrations like not having the cash to purchase cold storage to reserve and transport harvest waiting to be sold. Such was the case with a farmer in North Carolina whose story a DOL staffer related, who was harvesting his crops all day, leaving them to sit outside overnight, then driving 90 miles to market. Inevitably his routine was unsustainable, both due to the physical strain but also the loss of quality in his hard-earned harvest.

DOL’s approach is to operate as a food hub that actually has skin in the game and knows the community they’re supporting. For example, they know that many of the heads of household who shop at the market at Kelly Miller are seniors, so they established a convenient drive-thru option. And recognizing that folks who pay with government assistance still want the sovereignty of picking and choosing which carrots or bell peppers go in their box ensures that all DOL staffers and volunteers are trained to know their produce and treat all customers with dignity and respect. It’s these types of efforts, from the herculean physical feats of moving thousands of pounds of food, to the mundane of setting up processes that flow smoothly, that reduce the risk of food waste across every farmer, company, organization, and household that touches DOL’s system. This is the kind of impact ReFED aims to have anywhere people have access to their solutions.

Food sovereignty, food security, environmental protection, racial justice, better health outcomes: so many things could be improved by what ReFED is trying to achieve.

Harvard’s Leib offers a blunter rationale for supporting ReFED’s mission against food waste. “It’s just a stupid problem,” she says. “Nobody is benefitting from this.”

New Zealand startup BioLumic is producing radically healthier and more productive crops, simply by exposing them to novel “recipes” of UV light.

PALMERSTON NORTH, NEW ZEALAND

On four narrow shelves in a windowless room in a nondescript building in the New Zealand city of Palmerston North, eight dozen little cannabis clones are quietly and invisibly revolutionizing agriculture. 

Banks of LEDs sit above each row of plants, bathing them in purple light. Some of the tiny diodes are blue, some are red—standard grow lights that mimic sunlight and enable crops to be grown indoors. But other LEDs are ultraviolet, producing various wavelengths that can’t be seen by human eyes. They’ve been electronically programmed at certain intensities and frequencies, and to turn on and off at particular intervals, according to a commercially-secret ‘light recipe.’

The plants will spend six days on these shelves, soaking up the UV like starlets on sunbeds—and by the end of the week, they’ll be changed forever.

These light recipes are not just for cannabis—far from it. The science on display here is being developed at the international headquarters of BioLumic, a New Zealand-based agritech startup that’s been shortlisted for the Food Planet Prize for its work investigating a big and wild idea: that briefly exposing all kinds of young plants and seeds to specific ‘recipes’ of energy-efficient ultraviolet light can cause physiological changes that result in significantly faster growth, higher yields, and greater resilience to pests and diseases for the rest of their lives.

So far, BioLumic has proven the technique works with a handful of crops—lettuces, corn, tomatoes, cannabis, strawberries, soybeans—and is experimenting with a dozen more, including many of the world’s staple grains. They’ve already shown that ultraviolet light can boost the yield of strawberries by 47 percent, and increase the vigor of soybean plants by 39 percent.

Best of all, it’s completely organic. No extra fertilizer or pesticides, no genetic modification, no energy-intensive hydroponics or lifelong grow lights. All the plants need is a few days—or in the case of seeds, a few seconds—of light. 

It does sound too good to be true, admits BioLumic founder and Chief Science Officer Jason Wargent—but the science is sound. “The idea of programming plants with light to express their potential? Yeah, it’s a sales pitch, but it’s an amazing one. It’s like a whole otherworldly future.”

The explanation for how it all works, however, begins in the deep past—around half a billion years ago, back when the first terrestrial plants began evolving

“The company’s story was actually 600 million years in the making because that’s when the first mechanistic changes occurred in plants,” Wargent says.

Ultraviolet light is not just one ‘color’—there’s a whole invisible rainbow of it. Scientists generally split the rainbow into three groups of wavelengths. UVC waves are the shortest and strongest, but are completely absorbed by the ozone layer and atmosphere. UVA wavelengths are the longest and weakest. The ozone layer in the stratosphere blocks most of the UVB waves, but those that sneak through are responsible for sunburn in humans—and in high concentrations, they can damage DNA, cells, and crucial proteins in plants. They can’t penetrate far into water.

Around 600 million years ago, the fledgling ozone layer had developed enough for organisms to venture out of the deep sea and into the shallows, resulting in the Cambrian Explosion—a massive diversification of life. By about 400-500 million years ago, the ozone layer was thick enough that the first plants could emerge onto land. But it was still a lot thinner than it is now, says Nick Albert, who studies the evolution of UV protection in plants at the New Zealand Institute Plant and Food Research, and is not connected with BioLumic.

That wafer-thin ozone layer meant more UVB was able to penetrate to the surface. To survive, terrestrial plants evolved mechanisms to detect levels of UVB radiation and defend themselves from it—making compounds called flavonoids that act as a kind of sunscreen.

Those protections enabled plants to multiply, evolve leaves and trunks and flowers, and spread across the landscape. Ultraviolet radiation gradually fell to roughly modern levels, but has periodically spiked numerous times since then due to geomagnetic reversals or ozone-layer depletion from climate change, potentially even leading to mass extinctions in the past.

Even under normal conditions, Albert points out, a tree can fall in the forest and suddenly expose the understory to a blaze of unaccustomed UV.  It makes evolutionary sense, then, that plants have held on to the ability to sense ultraviolet light and to change the way they grow in response. “Measuring and responding to UV light has been something that plants have been doing for a long, long time,” Albert says. “If it’s been retained throughout, then it must be really important.”

Research into plants and UV began in the 1970s and 80s, when scientists discovered that chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) emissions were severely depleting the ozone layer—the so-called ozone ‘hole’.  Seeking to understand how the corresponding rise in UVB radiation might affect the world’s crops and ecosystems, they initially focused on its harmful environmental effects at high concentrations.

However, after CFCs were banned under the Montreal Protocol in 1987—signed by all 198 United Nations member states and without which, scientists have calculated, plants worldwide would have suffered and climate change would be a lot worse—scientific interest shifted to the more subtle ways in which exposure to ultraviolet light helps to regulate plant growth on a daily basis.

That’s what Jason Wargent was working on when he moved to Palmerston North from Lancaster in the United Kingdom in 2010 for an academic job as a plant photobiologist at Massey University. In 2011, scientists in Germany and Scotland discovered a protein called UVB resistance 8 (UVR8) that enables plants to perceive UVB. At around the same time, the development of ultraviolet LEDs made it possible to conduct much more fine-tuned experiments. 

Research at Massey and elsewhere confirmed that when plants perceive the everyday presence of ultraviolet light with the UVR8 protein, they make minute adjustments to the way they grow in response. “Like they’re getting ready,” says Wargent. “Like they’re putting their armor plating on a little bit. And that gave us a toolkit to think about actually programming plants with UV.”

Wargent founded BioLumic in 2013. Early tests on lettuce in California showed that exposing young plants to specific recipes of ultraviolet light could cause a doubling of yield once they were planted out in fields that had half the typical amount of fertilizer applied. The treatments also reduced the plants’ susceptibility to downy mildew, a crippling fungal disease that deforms leaves and kills plants, by around 50 percent. Wargent’s theory was that the UV prompted them to make flavonoids—plant-based chemical compounds—that helped to resist the disease.

At the same time, trials on strawberry seedlings led to each plant producing 43 percent more strawberries without any loss of fruit size or sweetness. 

More recently, the company also began trials on cannabis. Unlike strawberries, cannabis plants are cloned and grown year-round, meaning there’s a consistent commercial opportunity for light-treatment. Wargent was also excited about the science.

Cannabis’ status as an illegal drug for the past half-century has meant there’s been limited research into the plant’s potential benefits—until now.

The treatments for cannabis are generally the same as for other BioLumic seedlings. Wargent’s team takes small cuttings from the mother plants, then places each clone in a sterile foam cube. Once the little plants have grown some roots, at around 2-3 weeks old and 4-5 inches high, they’re moved to the UV treatment shelves, where BioLumic’s (mostly female) scientists trial different light recipes on the various strains. The simplest way to think about the recipes, Wargent says, is that they’re unique combinations of wavelengths, time, frequency of timing, and strength. He won’t reveal any more detail—the rest, for now, is confidential.

After six days—“just a tiny amount of their life,” he says—they get transplanted into larger pots, and when they’re big enough, they’re moved to the ‘flowering room’, where the (non-ultraviolet) lights mimic the shorter days of autumn, triggering blooms to form.

The company started cannabis trials in early 2020. As the flowers ripened, the coronavirus spread around the world. In March, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the country would be placed in lockdown, one of the world’s strictest at the time. “We thought, what are we going to do? Our babies!” says Wargent. The evening before the restrictions came in, the entire team pulled together to harvest the marijuana flowers and send them off for analysis.

As they all isolated at home, the results came through: the flower yield—the mass—had increased by an average of 44 percent in the treated plants compared to controls.

Since then, the scientists have refined the recipes, and have had more success with some cultivars than others. BioLumic treatments have boosted the yield of the ’White Cheese’ strain by 59 percent, increased the cannabinoids in its flowers by 27 percent, and the THC by 94 percent.  Wargent points out that they’re not being grown for recreational purposes, but for medicinal cannabis companies that harvest the active ingredients for health products. Greater yield could make for cheaper products for those that need them.

Increasing yield is the “holy grail” of agricultural research, Wargent says. If you can make a plant produce more with the same inputs (water, fertilizer, pest and disease control) you can feed more people more quickly with less land. Fewer forests need to be cut down, less energy is needed, farmers can earn more, and food will cost less.  The techniques BioLumic is perfecting on cannabis could have far wider implications for global food security.  

Treating tiny plants with light is one thing—leaves are light-detection machines, after all—but seeds are another. Discovering that the recipes worked even with seeds was a ‘eureka moment’, says Wargent, which significantly broadens the technology’s potential global impact: most staple food crops are grown from seed, and are sown en masse directly where they will grow.

The team started by treating already-germinated seeds for 24 hours, placing them on a tray under the UV LEDs in a fridge-like cubicle. Further experiments revealed it was enough to treat a dry seed for a matter of minutes, even seconds, to change the trajectory of its life. “Almost by the time you shut the door, the treatment’s over,” says Wargent.

And it doesn’t seem to matter what kind of seed it is. So far, the team has experimented with soybean, corn, canola, lettuce, and broccoli seeds, with tests just beginning on peas, ryegrass, wheat, oats, barley, and rice. 

“So far, all the seeds we’ve tried, it’s worked,” says BioLumic New Zealand R&D lead Ana Pontaroli, who was previously a wheat breeder in Argentina. It seems incredible, but seeds are not dead, just inert, she says. They lie in wait for a signal—light, water—that tells them to start growing. It seems BioLumic’s treatments simply provide an additional stimulus to which the seeds respond.

Field trials with BioLumic-treated soybeans in the United States showed they grew faster, resulting in a 25 percent yield increase compared with controls. Commercial breeding programs would typically invest in a variety that showed a 2 percent yield, says Wargent. “So to get double-digit percentage gains by just turning a little switch…”

In addition, when the US team deliberately inflicted a pest attack on the leaves of the fully-grown plants, they found that those that had been light-treated as seeds had half the amount of insect predation than the control plants did.

“Crops with early vigor can be more efficient in uptaking nutrients and water and competing with weeds,” says Pontaroli.  “And if that translates into final yield, that’s obviously a gain for the farmers. That’s something that gives us hope it can be translated into a product.”

The few farmers with direct experience of BioLumic seeds are already impatient to get their hands on more of them.

West of Palmerston North, the landscape is flat, farming heartland. Dairy cows stomp mud across neon green paddocks. On one horizon, hundreds of wind turbines are strung along the Tararua Range. On the other, the massive snow-draped volcanic peaks of Taranaki and Ruapehu loom surreally above the plains.

Near the agriculturally-named town of Bulls—adorned with bovine statues on every street corner—is Waitatapia Station. The name means ‘plenty of good water’ in Māori, and the farm stretches across 2200 hectares of sandy country in five blocks near the Rangitikei River.

Three generations of Hew Dalrymple’s family have farmed here for a century. Around 25,000 lambs and 2000 beef cows are fattened here each year, the paddocks interspersed with forestry blocks of radiata pine. The Dalrymples also grow maize, barley, and wheat, and vegetables for the frozen and fresh markets—sweetcorn, peas, beans, cabbages, broccoli, cauliflower, and parsley.

The scale allows Dalrymple to be an early-adopter of new technology, equipment, techniques and crops. “In the last 25 years, we’ve had some form of trial on the farm every single year, and quite often multiple trials on different things.”

So when Wargent came to him a few years ago asking to test BioLumic corn on the property, Dalrymple immediately agreed.  Light affecting plants’ growth seemed logical, he thought, but seeds? “I thought to myself, now we’re getting a little bit extreme—light treatment on a seed? But I did think that if it works, that’s outstanding, because there’s only a limited amount you can do with treating plants. You can’t efficiently go and treat a paddock of maize with light.”

Wargent’s team treated around 1000 corn seeds with UV, and planted them in a 10×20 meter patch inside one of Waitatapia’s cornfields. In every other way, the seeds were identical to the rest of the crop. But at harvest time, when Darymple walked out among the swaying green stems and came to the BioLumic patch, he was staggered at what he saw.

“It struck me down,” he says, shaking his beanie-clad head. “It was unbelievable. Unbelievable.”

In a typical maize paddock, he explains, the plants are uneven. Although they’re genetically identical, some are taller and stronger, while others are weedy and small. But in the BioLumic area, all the plants were the same. The best plants weren’t any better than the biggest control plants, but there weren’t any that were stunted. 

When the scientists lifted the corn from the soil, the BioLumic plants had much larger root systems. And when they analyzed the yield, the treated plants produced at least 10 percent more kernels by weight. (A second trial in 2022 recorded a 15 percent increase.) It wasn’t that the cobs were bigger, it’s just that they were all big. The plants had maximized their potential. “It came from lifting the bottom ones up,” says Dalrymple.

A ten percent yield increase would equate to hundreds or thousands of extra dollars in his pocket, he says, and if the treatment costs less than that, “why wouldn’t you do it?” That’s without even considering the other potential benefits. BioLumic hasn’t conducted fully organic trials yet, but even having to apply less fertilizer and pesticide would have environmental as well as economic upsides, he says. 

“This is game-changing stuff in my opinion—it is extraordinary tech.” He was so impressed by the results, in fact, that Waitatapia Station made a small investment into BioLumic. “People could say you have a biased view, but I wouldn’t have said anything different to you if I didn’t have a cent in it,” he says.

BioLumic can now show that their recipes work, but they’re still unraveling exactly how. We know that plants sense UVB with the UVR8 protein, which then triggers a bunch of genes to be expressed. But plants have many different receptors to sense visible light, so it’s possible there are other UV receptors we haven’t discovered yet. 

The company’s scientists also aren’t yet sure exactly what is going on inside the plant that leads to increased yields or increased cannabinoids—just how the UV light “unlocks its potential”, as Leyla Bustamante, BioLumic R&D Science Manager puts it. “You could be an athlete, you just need to train—so likewise, there’s this potential in the plants to do the things that normally they don’t.”

Originally from Colombia, Bustamante is a molecular biologist who worked on malaria in the UK for 17 years before moving to New Zealand and joining BioLumic in 2019. Although she had never worked on plants before, as a biologist, she was “interested in anything that has a good question and a good hypothesis and good data to answer those.” She found BioLumic’s question fascinating: “Just like, what is happening inside that is telling this little organism to change, to be better? As a biologist, that’s just beautiful.” 

The company’s scientists are beginning to glimpse the genetic basis of the changes wrought by the light treatments, Wargent says. They take a tiny leaf sample the day after the plants come off the UV shelf, crush it up in a mortar and pestle, and run the genetic material through a desktop PCR machine.

That’s enabled them to identify ‘marker’ genes that are expressed in the treated plants, but not in the controls. Wargent hopes those markers may allow them to play detective, and investigate the pathways that lead to increased yield—or even reduced inputs of fertilizer, fungicides, or pesticides.

As the genetic data mounts, he plans to use machine learning to predict which recipes are likely to be successful for which varieties. “We think there are billions of these potential recipes, even just in the UV space—different timings, intensities, durations, wavelengths. Billions. So how are we going to test all those? We have to predict them.”

The knowledge gained in the process could even have much broader implications.

“We’ve got a reasonable chance of understanding [how] yield might be controlled in a way that no one understands today,” Wargent says. And light might only be one route to influencing it. “There could be other ways you could pull instantaneous within-lifetime levers in crops.”

If Hew Dalrymple could plant entirely BioLumic corn tomorrow, he would. But the start-up is only on the cusp of commercialization. To illustrate the problems of scale, Dalrymple does a few sums. Waitatapia alone uses around 105,000 seeds per hectare of maize, and last year, they planted 115 hectares. That’s more than 12 million corn seeds every year, just on one New Zealand farm.  Globally, “there’s trillions, there’s kazillions of seeds grown a year.”

Reaching that scale isn’t impossible, it will just take time, Wargent says. In the US, BioLumic is experimenting with a conveyor belt system to treat more seeds at once. In 2021, they trialed light-treated soybean seeds on 1700 field plots in 74 locations. The company is close to commercializing a cannabis product in collaboration with an Auckland medicinal marijuana company. 

The business model is not selling devices or hardware. Instead, BioLumic plans to license the light recipes, providing the hardware for free or through partnerships with manufacturers (they have just signed a deal with global grow light company Fluence.)

That means farmers wouldn’t have to make an expensive investment up-front; they would simply pay a royalty on top of the cost of their seeds, just as they do already for other common treatments and coatings. The price of the BioLumic treatment would be similar, too, Wargent says. “It has to work for the farmer.”

Ultimately, he envisions a future where a seed cooperative in Africa can take out a license to provide a BioLumic UV treatment locally to smallholders, with the confidential recipes beamed wirelessly from New Zealand to the LED device at the push of a button. 

But in addition to logistics and scale, and developing the precise products for each crop, a few more years of field trials are needed, Wargent says. “Having repeated seasons in different varieties of each crop, proving beyond doubt that your technology provides benefits to farmers.”

“Farming is hard, and it takes time, and science is also hard and takes a long time. You don’t go from promising work to something that is scaled across the planet in 12 months. We’ve developed the technology. Now we’re developing the product.”

Sitting in his farm truck on a winter morning in June, looking out over the stubble where the latest BioLumic corn trial was harvested, Dalrymple is as close to excitement as a Kiwi farmer typically allows himself to be. “Ten years ago, if someone said to me, we’re going to alter the yield of plants just by zapping light onto a seed, I’d have said, I don’t think so. But here we are—there’s no debate about it. It’s just a fact now that light treatment of seed is going to be part of the farming world.”

Deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon, an organization called Yakum is seeding a better, cleaner, greener future for the Siekopai people.

SIEKOPAI REMOLINO, ECUADOR

Antonio Francisco Noteno and his wife Liliana had a plan. They were going to clear the forest on their property to finally be able to make some money. They would bring a bunch of cattle up to their plot in the Amazon, and they would plant African palms for palm oil, a hugely popular cash crop in their corner of Ecuador. But in the middle of the process—they had already cleared 8 of their 20 hectares—Liliana heard a cry for help.

Actually, they were both drinking yagé—better known as Ayahuasca, a psychedelic medicine sacred to many peoples in the Amazon and an important part of the Siekopai culture. In the middle of their ceremony, a tiny tick entered Liliana’s vision.

The tick had a question for Liliana: “This is my home, my life. Why are you destroying my house?”

As Noteno tells this story later, he places his palm on his chest. “At first, I didn’t agree with my wife. I said, ‘Do you think the money is going to fall from the leaves? Do you think our daughters are going to study for free because their parents plant trees? No! We need money.’”

But then, he says, he reconsidered. “How could I not change my mind and support my wife, when she told me about this? Eventually, planting fruit trees will be useful for me. I have two daughters, they’re eight and nine. One day, when they grow up, their children and families will be able to consume what we plant today.”

The Seed is planted

And so, just like that, Noteno became a partner with Yakum, an organization that supports Ecuador’s indigenous communities by helping them restore and strengthen their forests. In Noteno’s case, that meant planting unguragua and camu camu for food, balsamo of Peru for wood and blue huaryruro for crafts.

Nick Ovenden, a British biologist and educator, first launched Yakum—the name comes from the Shuar language word for howler monkey, of which the cry was a metaphor for Yakum’s call to action—as a GoFundMe in 2018. The following year, Mike McColm, an experienced environmental organizer and activist originally from California, joined the effort. Together they legally established Yakum as an NGO and set out to figure out how to help indigenous families like Noteno and Liliana’s make sustainable, regenerative land use a reality on their lands in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

The idea is a powerful one: help the people of the Amazon ensure their food supply—including the Siekopai community—without destroying the forest in the process. By planting trees for food as a viable alternative both to processed foods and to fast-cash but destructive crops such as palm oil, Yakum hopes to support to improve food sovereignty and nutrition—with so-called Food Forests. The forces they are fighting against are complex and relentless—industrialization, deforestation, urbanization, culture and language loss—but Yakum thinks seeds can be a potent countermeasure.

Thankfully, the Amazon is home to superhero seeds. The fruit of the camu camu has 100 times the vitamin C of lemons. The morete palm produces a thousand pounds of fruit a year, with 11 times the vitamin A of a carrot, provides habitat for up to 900 living species, and has leaves that can be used to make thatched roofing. The jaboticaba fruits six times a year and is used to make jelly, desserts, wine, soft drink, ice cream, even wine. The inga ilta tree has pods up to three feet long with edible pulp like its cousin the ice cream bean, but also has edible seeds that provide much needed protein. As a bonus, its leaf litter is an abundant nitrogen fixer, like a “fertilizer factory for the soil”, says McColm.

Yakum has a nursery in Sachawaysa, near Tena, where McColm lives. He personally provides many of the seeds to Yakum from his own land, but the 12 member Yakum team also forages for seeds—for fruit trees, hardwood trees, medicinal plants. They have planted 223 different species, including several on The World List of Threatened Trees, such as the mahogany tree. McColm’s eyes shine when he recalls the first time he saw mahogany seeds in nature, back in the 1990s: “It was like picking up gold.”

McColm has an avuncular, effusive enthusiasm for these plants and their powers. If you ask him to start describing the work, you’ll get a flowing river of facts and asides and bon mots and place names and phylum names and names of people he cares about deeply and thinks Yakum can help. Since he first came to Ecuador in 1983 he has worked with the Awajún people in the Peruvian Amazon, and with reforestation throughout Ecuador, from the inlands to the coast. In total, he estimates, he has contributed to planting approximately seven million trees over his career. “I really just enjoy getting to plant a lot of trees all the time,” he says with a smile as we sit down for a lunch of, of all things, falafel in Tena.

Ruth Payaguaje, Mike Mccolm, and Arley Piaguaje are part of the Yakum team helping to reforest communities in the Amazon basin

Bridging distances

The name of the Siekopai roughly translates as “multicolored people”. The Spanish called them los encabellados—the long-haired—after the way their men wore their hair. There are 14 indigenous nationalities of Ecuador, totaling 1.1 million people. Kichwa is the biggest group, followed by the Shuar people, with 100,000 inhabitants. Only a quarter of indigenous Ecuadoreans live in the Amazon, and those include some of the country’s most vulnerable populations, like the Siekopai, who number a little less than 700 people, according to the last census made three years ago.

Their lands can also seem remarkably remote. The settlement of Siekopai Remolino, population 250, is only accessible by canoe, and a recent monitoring mission with Yakum took five days, much of it traveling on the river past endless plantations belonging to the country’s biggest palm oil company, Palmeras del Ecuador (Ecuador is now the 11th largest palm producer in the world). These logistical challenges are constant for Yakum: having run out of room in the canoe for saplings, they began transporting the germinating seeds instead.

Distances notwithstanding, Yakum is committed to monitoring the trees they plant. Every two or three months after planting, they return to measure height and circumference and viability. It is a source of extreme pride, and a key to their success, that their plantings have a survival rate of 95% or higher in those initial check-ins.

Gilberto Piaguaje, a Siekopai elder, meets our group when we arrive and we join him while he plants corn, an increasingly important crop for the Siekopai (they make flatbread with corn flour as well as cassava flour). Piaguaje tells a story about how his grandparents drank ayahuasca, which gave them the ability to travel far away as spirits, and then how they came back with the first Siekopai corn. But it’s soon clear these were not grandparents, but ancestors, and he’s speaking of events that happened centuries or more ago.

It’s not just his stories that seem suspended in time. Traditions are everywhere. Before leaving to work in the forest he always paints his face with red tincture. This is, Piaguaje says, to protect him from the wild spirits.

But at some point, the romantic notions of indigenous life in the Amazon also collide with the reality that Piaguaje, like all Siekopai, are living in modern times, and they face some very modern problems.

The Amazon Basin is a place where people live. It is the world’s biggest tropical forest, of great importance for the rest of the world. But it is also everchanging—not something pristine, but an enormous area with many footprints from humans, cities, villages, television, clothes, money, drugs, alcohol, dreams, contaminations, deforestation, plastics, malnutrition. It is also home to millions of people, with big cities like Manaus and Iquitos. And the people living in the Amazon need something to live off. They need money.

So even as Piaguaje looks to his dreams for information about when to sow the corn, he is also worried about the present-day political and economic threats to Siekopai territory and the Amazon in general.

There is much to worry him. The government seems failing in its fight against illegal gold mining throughout the Amazon region. The river that flows alongside Siekopai Remolino—the Aguarico river—is severely contaminated from decades of oil extraction and pollution in nearby oil fields. Upstream raw sewage is dumped into the Aguarico from Lago Agro, and then there’s oil NNdischarge, mercury from mining, toxic agrochemicals for palm oil. And yet oil extraction in Amazon continues to be Ecuador’s most important source of income, as it has been for decades. Even smaller incursions, like a band of violent cattlemen and squatters who crossed in from Colombia in the beginning of September, are a serious threat to the Siekopai, requiring a concerted vigilante effort to keep them from destroying the forests.

For Piaguaje, the key to the Siekopai standing strong against all these forces is reinforcing their own lands. “For me, forests with animals and rivers is a wealth. The forest covers us, it is like a house for us… that’s why we always talk about conservation, because in other communities they already see more the money, they want to change to a new way of life. Money in exchange for logging the forest and to plant African palm,” says Piaguaje. “This is what we always talk about, and now in the meetings. We could look for someone who can pay us because we are guardians and caretakers of the forests. Because in other parts of the world you say that this forest is purifying the air, that they are the lungs of the world. That is why we are planting fruit trees and reforesting. We are resisting with our way of thinking,” he says.

Piaguaje tells the story of how he has been bitten by the so-called X snake, a type of pit viper that is one of the most venomous snakes in Ecuador. Several of his dogs were also bitten. If it is not treated, it is deadly. But he shows me a medical plant, which he used to heal himself and the dogs. Piaguaje reflects on the value of the forest and the wildlife within it. “If I cut down my forest I have nothing. I will totally lose my way of life. Seeing the forest being cut down elsewhere feels like a strong pain to me,” says Piaguaje.

Growing to the challenge

Yakum has grown quickly to meet the challenge. Today they have a broad range of donors, from Belgium’s BOS+ ($115,000), the US-based Regen Network ($100,000), Lush cosmetics ($100,000), Rotary International ($65,000), and many more. In total, they have Yakum planted approximately 30,000 trees, at an ever-increasing pace. In 2021 they planted 10,000 trees in total. In just the first six months of 2022 they planted the same amount.

But their real innovation lies in listening. “We support the community,” McColm says. “We listen to what they need and try to help.” Staffers like Arley Orlando Payaguaje, a 23-year-old Siekopai, make Yakum what McColm says is the most diverse NGO in Ecuador.

Payaguaje has always been intrigued by economic alternatives for his people. He describes how things have changed since he was a teenager watching Ovenden and Yakum begin their outreach. “In the beginning, people were not really interested in planting trees,” says Payaguaje. “What’s the idea of planting a tree and then waiting 15 years for its fruits, if I’m hungry today and I need money to send my children to school now?” But these days he’s already showing people results, how the trees grow, and now Siekopai people are asking him when they too can get their seeds, he says.

Another Yakum ally, a biologist named Lexie Gropper, runs the Amisacho Restauration center close to the jungle city of Lago Agrio, which is known mostly for years and years of oil extraction. Gropper says that if you want to support the land, you have to think about people’s financial situation. “The economic part is essential. People make decisions based on finances,” she says. “They might like to conserve the forest and plant trees, but if they lack money to send their children to school, then they will cut down the forest anyway.”

It is, inevitably, all related. The old ways of maintaining food security didn’t involve currency at all; it was based on the chakra system of small gardens along with a little bit of livestock and a lot of hunting and gathering. But as even those hybrid agrarian and indigenous lifestyles fall to modern pressures, nutrition has become a crisis. In Yakum’s most recent study of four Kichwa villages near Sachawaysa, they found that 68% of the population suffers from malnutrition, eating just one meal a day and that almost entirely processed foods. Even in Siekopai Remolino, which is near Yasuní National Park, known as one of the most biodiverse places on earth, fruitful agriculture is hard to come by.

“Many have this wrong idea that the soil in the Amazon is nutritious,” says McColm. “But really it is bad, and often there have been bad practices for decades. That’s why we also work with soil regeneration,” says McColm. Restoring the soil is Gropper’s scientific specialty; improving the soil before planting is a large part of Yakum’s success. Hence the nitrogen-fixing plants, and Gropper’s use of bokashi, the fermentation-driven composting technique.

But there is more the biology at play in feeding people well. Processed foods have taken over much of Amazonian life. They first arrived with the oil exploration roads in the 1970’s, and soon small markets opened up throughout indigenous lands. Now processed foods are the cheapest and most readily available foods in the Amazon.

“You have to look at it in a holistic way.” says McColm. “You must support their culture, for them to continue to be connected with their territory and forest.” That is why Yakum also supports cultural activities in communities, such as ceramics. It’s why, when bandits attack or illegal miners encroach, Yakum sees it as part of their mission to offer material support, even just money for food or transport. “The palm growers are knocking on the door in Remolino,” he says. “They’ve been holdouts, protecting forests where other native communities haven’t.”

Looking to the future

Back in Siekopai Remolino, Noteno is trying to strike the right balance.

“We need money to educate our children. We must work to educate our children and be able to send them to good schools and universities. We also need money to buy gasoline to be able to move on the river, and we need to buy groceries, like cooking oil, salt, and soap,” Noteno continues. But he couldn’t imagine turning his land over to palm oil. Not anymore.

Noteno still has six cows, and also pigs. He shows me some marks on the bark of a tree: it’s from the tigrillo—the northern tiger cat, a threatened species. Yes, it comes through occasionally and eats some of Noteno’s chickens. But it’s a valued visitor nonetheless, a sign of health of the land.

“When you grow oil palm, you use a lot of chemicals. We would destroy the soil and it would be detrimental to us. Also, I would get sick faster because of the chemicals. The oil palm is destroying more and more—as Siekopai we are cornered. If someone plants oil palm, this is going to go a long way. Others will say, I want to plant oil palm, like him. Being affected by oil companies and oil-palm plantations is really sad. I changed my mind and now I am reforesting with joy,” says Noteno.

Since February, Noteno and his wife have planted around 600 trees. His goal is to reach 4,000 by the end of the year. He also wants to build a small lodge to receive tourists here; some of the fruit trees are particularly good for attracting monkeys. They also have toucans and macaws. The tree planting is urgent, says Noteno: “We must do this, before people start to think that the African palm is good. Otherwise, we are going to lose this forest,” he says.

How a 141-year-old waste management company is pioneering the recycling—rather than mining–of phosphorus and other nutrients we need to keep feeding the world.

UPPSALA, SWEDEN

The person who discovered phosphorus was hoping to find something else. In Hamburg in 1669, the self-styled chemist Hennig Brand was, like many of his peers at the time, trying to turn base metals into gold. Believing that the human body was the key, he boiled large amounts of urine and heated the residue, eventually producing a white, waxy substance that glowed in the dark. Brand called his discovery phosphorus, from the Greek for “light-bearer.” (He later sold his supply for 200 thalers—about $13,300 in today’s money—when he needed some cash.)

For more than a century phosphorus was made through this method, for example to produce an early version of matches, until the 18th century when a couple of Swedish chemists discovered that calcium phosphate could be sourced from bones, which became an early fertilizer. This and other discoveries eventually led to the development of commercial fertilizers, by far the largest global use for phosphorus, and enabled the Green Revolution and a massive global population boom.

But the way we source phosphorus—mining it from reserves in a handful of countries and importing it—is unstable and unsustainable. Phosphorus feeds the world but also pollutes it, and phosphorus prices and conflict are disrupting food production. There’s a race on, once again, to revolutionize how we get our phosphorus, and scientists are, as they were at the beginning, looking at human waste for answers.

In 2005, Yariv Cohen, then a 34-year-old chemical engineer, was working on this problem when he made his own accidental discovery. While conducting PhD research in recovering phosphorus from sewage sludge ash—a byproduct of incinerating sewage sludge—at Sweden’s University of Agricultural Sciences, he set up an experiment to recover phosphorus in the form of a highly concentrated ammonium phosphate solution. “I was testing a new idea for concentrating the solution without water evaporation—by circulating the ion exchange regeneration solutions and adding ammonia in a particular way to obtain a final product with as high a concentration as possible,” he says. He then left it to run overnight.

“I came to the lab in the morning, and instead of finding a highly concentrated solution as I expected, the system was completely clogged with white crystals, like it was covered with snow,” says Cohen.

“Initially, I was disappointed that the experiment failed,” he says. But it hadn’t: the white stuff turned out to be pure ammonium phosphate crystals, and he realized he had indeed found a method to recover solid phosphorus crystals without the need for evaporation—a new, more energy-efficient way.

^{_{Dr. Yariv Cohen, EasyMining’s Head of Research and Development.}}

Cohen’s PhD research and years of investigating phosphorus recovery techniques led to his current role as head of research and development at Sweden’s EasyMining. The company now holds several global patents for the extraction and recovery of resources from wastewater, sewage, and fly ash—a byproduct of incinerated waste—for which the company, along with its parent, Ragn-Sells, is shortlisted for the 2022 Food Planet Prize. Their technologies can potentially improve food security by recovering nutrients—producing better quality than mined ones—from waste to reuse in fertilizer and other uses, instead of relying on unstable global supply chains.

“The whole value chain needs to be changed,” says Cohen. There are many ways to recover nutrients from our food and waste cycle, but it’s not being done at a large scale—yet. “Quantities matter, and quality matters,” says Cohen, when it comes to making recovery viable. Both are a challenge.

Put simply, there is no life without phosphorus. Phosphates are essential for bones and teeth, for DNA, and for every living cell. As an essential ingredient in all fertilizers, it’s also crucial for crop growth. “Plants need all three–nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—to grow,” says Cohen. But unlike nitrogen, phosphorus is finite: it cannot be replaced, substituted, or manufactured.

The world’s phosphorus supplies—which took millions of years to form— are depleting, with reserves of phosphate rock concentrated in a handful of countries. Morocco, China, Egypt, Algeria, and Syria control 85% of the world’s phosphate rock reserves. About 80% of mined phosphate rock—sedimentary rock containing fossilized deposits composed of remains of animals, algae, and sea creatures—is converted into mineral fertilizers for global food production.

As earth’s population grows, we will need more phosphorus to produce food at a time when it’s becoming more scarce and much more expensive. The biggest need is in developing countries, which are already affected by rising prices. One large study released this summer states that global phosphate prices have risen 400% since 2020 and 1 in 7 farmers can’t access or afford phosphorus.

According to the latest US Geological Survey, the largest share of the world’s phosphorus reserves—around 70%, —is located in Morocco and the Western Sahara. China’s 5% of phosphorus reserves is a distant second, but China is the world’s largest producer, and if it keeps producing at the current rate, its reserves will be depleted in the next 35 years. There is only one operating phosphorus mine in the European Union, in Finland. This mine produces 1 million tonnes annually, about 10 percent of the EU’s need, and is projected to be depleted by 2035.

Along with having the most reserves, Morocco is the world’s largest exporter and the second largest producer of phosphates, if one includes Western Sahara, a long disputed territory where the remote Bou Craa mine is located. This mine has one of the world’s largest phosphorus deposits, at 1.7 billion tons, and currently produces 3 million tons annually. The mined rock is transported on the world’s largest conveyor belt system from the mine to the coast 61 miles away, from where it is shipped all around the world.

“Most of us, most days, will eat some food grown on fields fertilized by phosphate rock from [Bou Craa] mine,” environmental author and journalist Fred Pearce noted in Yale’s University’s Environment360 blog. Conflict and high costs have already disrupted production in Morocco. Unless we can recycle more phosphorus or access other sources, Morocco’s share of worldwide production could be 80% by 2100, a level of concentration that is inherently dangerous to global supply chains.

There is now another pressing problem with phosphorus and food security on the European continent. Russian-mined phosphate dominates the European import market, and the war in Ukraine was a looming topic at the 4th European Sustainable Phosphorus Conference (ESPC), held in Vienna in June 2022.

“Currently, the phosphorus price is so high because of a shortage we already had, and [Ukraine’s invasion by] Russia,” says Ludwig Hermann, President of the European Sustainable Phosphorus Platform, which organized the conference. Mining is precarious, but phosphorus needs are rising. That is why phosphorus recovery, long discussed but little implemented (at least not at scale), is having its moment. Phosphorus mines may be finite, but the substance can be recovered in several different ways from sources such as human waste, plant matter, manure, and the waste of food that has been treated with phosphorus fertilizer.

In 2019, over 500 scientists signed ‘The Helsinki Declaration,’ calling for food, agriculture, waste, and other sectors to improve global phosphorus sustainability.

At the ESPC in Vienna, over 300 people gathered at the Andaz Hotel conference center to discuss the latest in phosphorus sustainability—from across science and academia, industry, energy companies, fertilizer companies, researchers, journalists, politicians, EU policymakers. At the hotel’s conference center, attendees mingled around standing tables with coffee and Viennese pastries, but also among jars containing samples of fertilizer pellets, sewage sludge ash (which resembles ground coffee) and calcium phosphate (a white powder) that had been recycled, rather than mined.

Their goal: to arrive at what Christian Kabbe, CEO of EasyMining’s Germany office, calls the “reality stage.” That means not just recovering phosphorus, in large enough amounts and good enough quality—scrubbed of a lot of the toxic heavy metals such as cadmium and uranium that exist in sewage sludge ash—but also finding the market for it.

“Recovery tends to still be technology focused, and few have explored the market side,” says Kabbe. The amount of recovered phosphorus is also crucial: “There must be volume for recovered phosphorus to be viable. It can’t be pocket dust.”

Cohen’s lab “accident” as a PhD student resulted in EasyMining’s first patent, for Clean-MAP, a method for extracting ammonium phosphate from mining industry waste. Cohen and his colleague, Patrik Enfält—plus one investor—founded EasyMining in 2007 to commercialize its technologies. Since then, EasyMining has produced several patents, with the help of investment and support from its much older parent company.

Ragn-Sells is Sweden’s biggest waste management, recycling, and environmental services company. The three-generation family business has a waste management pedigree dating back to 1881, when Amandus Zakarias Leonard Sellberg set up a haulage company—at first, with just one horse—transporting latrines from central Stockholm to farms in the countryside.

In 1928, on his wife Julia’s family farm, Amandus and Julia’s son, Ragnar Sellberg, started a waste collection service for local home-owners. In the 1960s, Sellberg steered the company’s activities into waste management and recycling.

Ragn-Sells’ head office remains at the bucolic (but updated) Väderholmens Gård (farm) in Sollentuna, 11 miles north of Stockholm. On an early June afternoon, birdsong accompanies the hum of a robotic lawn mower ambling over manicured gardens in front of the company’s executive offices in an airy, sunny building. Electric car charging ports adorn the farm buildings—a cluster of wooden barns painted the “Falu red” pigment common in Scandinavia.

“I saw that what they do fit into our thinking of how to save resources,” says Erik Sellberg, Chairman of Ragn-Sells

Ragnar’s son, Erik Sellberg, Chairman of Ragn-Sells, explains that he never intended to go into the family business: he was studying economics when he seriously injured his knee in a boating accident. In his convalescence, he started working with the family firm, and in 1981 he joined Ragn-Sells full time. He invested in EasyMining in 2008, at first only privately, based on a “gut feeling,” In 2014, Ragn-Sells bought EasyMining outright. “I saw that what they do fit into our thinking of how to save resources,” says Sellberg.

“The long-term perspective of a family-owned company is what enables EasyMining to grow and develop,” says Cohen. Ragn-Sells, with its extensive experience in environmental management, is also willing to take the risks and challenges associated with producing new technology at large scale, he adds.

The acquisition of EasyMining, which now has 40 employees based between Uppsala, Gothenburg, and Berlin, aligns with Ragn-Sells’ long-held values. A banner in the office lobby displays a quote by Ragnar Sellberg: I see a beginning where others see an end. Ragn Sells’ and EasyMining’s mission is to help transform our linear economy—in which raw materials are collected, used, and dumped—to a circular economy in which we re-use and recirculate resources as much and for as long as possible. Our waste products contain valuable materials.

“Our strategy as a company is the belief that in the future, there will be no waste,” says Lars Lindén, Ragn-Sells’ CEO.

EasyMining’s roots are in phosphorus recovery, but it also holds patents for recovering other nutrients. Project Nitrogen (a working title) is currently being applied in partnership with BIOFOS—Denmark’s largest wastewater utility—to recover ammonium from wastewater at a demonstration plant in Copenhagen.

Ash2Salt recovers commercial salts from fly ash, which is produced from incinerating waste and usually exported or landfilled, neither of which are sustainable. The new Ash2Salt plant at Högbytorp, a few minutes from Väderholmen, will be fully operational in late 2022 through a licensed agreement with Swiss-Japanese energy-from-waste company Hitachi Zosen Nova. The plant will wash and treat fly ash at large scale to recover several types of commercial salts for de-icing roads and fertilizer, among other uses, and reduce dependence on mined salt.

But perhaps the largest opportunity for recovering nutrients such as phosphorus, right now, is in wastewater. “We want wastewater treatment plants to be the resource plants of the future,” says Pär Larshans, Ragn-Sells’ Director of Sustainability.

Dealing with wastewater—of which sewage is a subset—has been a challenge for as long as humans have gathered in great numbers. In Europe and North America, municipal sanitation systems grew out of the need to reduce typhoid and cholera outbreaks during the Industrial Revolution. London’s Great Stink of 1858—when hot weather and untreated sewage flowing into the Thames resulted in a major cholera outbreak, and made the city smell so bad that Members of Parliament soaked their curtains in chloride of lime—led to the construction of an extensive underground sewage system to convey sewage away from the population.

In the 19th century some cities began treating sewage—by settling it in lagoons, adding oxygen to reduce odor, or adding chemicals—in an effort to reduce water-borne disease outbreaks—a development that led to a huge increase in life expectancy. Starting in the 1840s, some sewage started to be applied to agricultural land as a fertilizer, with some success.

Even today’s treated wastewater contains large amounts of nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen—passed from agriculture and fertilizers to food and to our own waste—which is a waste disposal challenge, because they contribute to water pollution and eutrophication, an overgrowth of algae that can turn water bodies toxic. Sewage sludge, a semi-solid byproduct of wastewater treatment, is rich in nutrients but also in pathogens, so it has to be treated before disposal or reuse for agriculture. In most cases it is incinerated, a process that started in the 1930s.

Today, “there are three reasons to incinerate sewage sludge,” explains Cohen. Incineration detoxifies the sludge of pathogens, it increases the concentration of phosphorus (there is 0.8% phosphorus in sewage sludge, but 9% phosphorus in sewage sludge ash, as compared to 1.8% in rock phosphate from Finland’s phosphorus mine), and it reduces weight and volume by 90 percent, making logistics and transport simpler.

EasyMining’s Ash2Phos process—which involves treating sewage sludge ash with a series of chemical reactions employing hydrochloric acid, alkaline, and lime—can recover 90 percent of the phosphorus in sewage sludge ash, with a more than 96% reduction in contaminant heavy metals such as cadmium and uranium. The main substance it recovers is calcium phosphate—equivalent to mined rock phosphate, but with higher purity (mined Moroccan phosphate for instance is high in cadmium).

The process also has lower carbon dioxide emissions compared to sourcing virgin resources. A life-cycle assessment study by the IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute concluded that producing the same amount of calcium phosphorus from ash with the Ash2Phos process compared to sourcing it from non-renewable phosphate ore would save 20,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually.

The first Ash2Phos plants—the first in the world that will recover phosphorus at this scale—are in development in Germany and Sweden. The German plant, in Schkopau, is a partnership with utilities company Gelsenwasser and is projected to be completed in 2024.

That’s the recovery side; regulations make the market side a greater challenge. There are three potential routes for the recovered phosphorus that EasyMining obtains: fertilizer, animal feed, and food additives. While the EU is facilitating a move to a circular economy, there remains a legal barrier to achieving this because current EU laws prioritize origin, rather than quality, of phosphorus and other recycled nutrients.

“EasyMining’s recycled phosphorus cannot be used for feed, no matter the quality, and cannot be used for food additives, no matter the quality, because of its origin,” says EasyMining’s Kabbe, in Vienna. This despite that the recycled phosphorus is of higher purity than that in traditional fertilizers.

Products recycled from waste can’t be used for agricultural feed for animals or for food additives. This legal taboo is a relic from the BSE (“mad cow disease”) crisis in the United Kingdom in the 1980s and 90s. Back then, however, there was no significant nutrient recycling from waste to be used. “When these laws were written, nobody was doing what we are doing yet,” says Anna Lundbom, EasyMining’s marketing manager.

While there is a market for recycled nutrients for fertilizers in conventional farming, there is also still a ban on their use in organic farming. This would seem to deprive recovered phosphorus of a natural target market. What better evangelists and early adopters of a circular economy than organic farmers and their consumers?

The needle may be slowly moving on that front. The 2022 working program of the EU’s Expert Committee on Organic Farming includes the consideration of allowing some recycled nutrients in organic farming. Should the EU decide to open the directive, it will be possible to apply for an exemption from the law, explains Larshans, although ideally the law itself would change.

This change in attitude, says Larshans, could be “an important starting point for future sustainable farming.” With that shift, by 2025, EasyMining could be able to supply organic farmers with recycled organic fertilizers.

Ludwig Hermann of the European Sustainable Phosphorus Platform is a little more cautious in his optimism. “So far, nothing has happened, but some movement seems to be detectable,” he says.

There are other challenges to the wider application of nutrient recovery technology. Hermann mentions two: cost and risk perception.

“There will be a cost increase, albeit small, for phosphorus recovery, and a debate about who pays, which will probably be citizens, probably through wastewater treatment,” says Hermann. “In Austria, we have an annual bill for wastewater treatment. From 300 euros a year, it might be 303 euros,” he says.

But politicians will be reluctant to impose costs, no matter how little, he points out, particularly with the current energy and inflation issues.

At present, there is also limited experience with large-scale phosphorus-recovery. “Because it is not yet widely available, there is an additional risk perception,” says Hermann. Still, his feeling is that EasyMining’s plants in Germany and Sweden will set the ball rolling in the rest of Europe, and elsewhere.
“It is quite challenging to set up large-scale production of new processes to move to a circular economy,” says Cohen. “In addition to the main recovered product, you need to develop and find offtakes for all by-products, and in contrast to the mining industry, any disposal of residues will require, in several countries, paying landfill tax.”

It’s difficult to compete with the traditional way of producing fertilizers, he adds. For example, OCP, Morocco’s largest phosphorus producer, simply discharges the waste into the sea at low cost.

Legislation for recovering phosphorus is creating a market—in Europe at least—for wider implementation. In 2006, Switzerland enacted a law to make the recovery of phosphorus from slaughterhouse waste and sewage sludge obligatory. Germany—which has the most sewage sludge ash in Europe—has introduced a phosphorus recovery law stipulating that wastewater treatment plants above a certain capacity will have to recover phosphorus from sewage sludge by 2029, and have a plan for doing so in 2023.

Austria has been considering a law for phosphorus recovery, but it is not yet mandatory. Stll, on June 19, 2022—the day before the city hosted the ESPC—Vienna’s City Hall announced its own plans to recover phosphorus from sewage sludge ash. The City of Vienna’s local authority and Wien Energie, Austria’s largest energy provider—which already incinerates wastewater and garbage for reuse at its surreal, Hundertwasser-designed Wonka’s Chocolate Factory of a plant in Vienna’s 9th district—plan to build and operate a plant to process sewage sludge ash by 2030.

Nicole Puzsar, head of public relations for Stadt Wien, or City of Vienna, says the first crude plans for recovering phosphorus in Vienna date back to 2015. “A well-functioning waste management economy has always been a high priority for Vienna, which also considers itself a pioneer in the field of the circular economy,” says Puzsar.

Above all, partnerships across fields and borders are necessary for moving towards nutrient recovery and to a circular economy. “Cooperation, knowledge, technology, and expertise-sharing is the key to making this work,” says Larshans. “Market demand is there, policies are on their way, but we need to speed up the process,” he adds.

EasyMining’s Kabbe describes it as a “push-pull” process between industry, innovation, and science, and getting regulators and policymakers on board. “The costs on the market level are competitive,” he says. “Now, it’s a political question.”

“ The costs on the market level are competitive.

Now, it’s a political question.”

– Christian Kabbe, CEO of EasyMining’s Germany office

Thousands of tons of avocados (and other fruits) rot before they have a chance to reach our plates. By creating an edible, protective second ‘peel,’ Apeel Sciences wants to get more and better produce to our tables.

PAUMA VALLEY, CALIFORNIA, USA

Balancing precariously on the 41st rung of a ladder propped on the bough of an avocado tree, an avocado picker extends a 12-foot (3.6 meter) pole and deftly strips the branches of their fruit. His right leg wrapped around two rungs, torso twisted 180 degrees, he works from branch to branch, filling the navy canvas pouch slung across his chest.

He nimbly descends the ladder, which wobbles in the breeze providing fresh relief on the scorching mountainside, tugs on the cord to collapse the ladder, and maneuvers it to the next branch. He repeats the process again, and again, day after day, zigzagging across San Diego’s North County until Cal Pacific Growers’ entire avocado crop is stripped.

This is the very beginning of the food production chain that provides 6.25 billion avocados to millions of Americans every year. After they’re picked, the avocados are sent to a packing warehouse, distributed to grocery stores, taken home in brown paper shopping bags, and, if they’re lucky, smashed onto toast.

But thousands of tons of avocados are left in the fruit bowl just one day too long, and never reach the plate. Apeel Sciences, a Goleta, California-based biotechnology company, has devised a way to extend avocados’ fleeting window of ripeness (and freshness) by creating an invisible coating—a kind of second peel that mimics the way plants naturally protect themselves—applied post-harvest to avocados and other produce. This step could make a dent in one of the most pressing problems of agriculture: food waste. For this initiative, they are shortlisted for the 2022 Food Planet Prize.

Each year, around 40% of all food in the US goes uneaten, equating to around $165 billion of food that could have been used to make more than 58 billion meals. According to ReFED—a US non-profit working to reduce food waste, and a fellow finalist for the 2022 Food Planet Prize—if just half of that food was recovered, every hungry person in the US could be fed three meals a day, every day.

Although some of this “surplus food” is recycled in various ways, the majority goes straight to landfill or incineration. ReFED estimates that 24% of all food—54 million tons—goes to these waste destinations. Food waste has a huge impact on the environment: producing food is an energy-intensive process, and food that ends up in landfills produces large amounts of methane, and households are the largest generator of food waste. For every 100 lbs of food waste in landfills, 8.3 pounds of methane is emitted into the atmosphere.

Food waste is one of the most preventable challenges of our time. The climate-focused nonprofit Project Drawdown recently affirmed that food waste reduction is a top solution for mitigating climate change. As a result, nonprofits, city councils, and tech start-ups across the US have been pioneering ways to save as much food from landfills as possible.

Just over a decade ago, James Rogers, a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was driving home through the region’s patchworked farmlands, listening to a podcast about global hunger. As his car curved through the winding roads that cut through lush green fields, he wondered in a world where food was so simple to grow, how could 820 million people be going hungry? And if so, many people were going hungry, where was all this food going?

Over the next few weeks, the question stuck with Rogers. Although his Ph.D. focused on solar power, he began to ponder whether food waste was a more pressing issue.

He began tinkering with fresh foods, studying crops that had a long shelf life, such as citrus fruits, and comparing them against those that didn’t, such as strawberries and cucumbers. “It simply doesn’t make sense that so many people are struggling with the compounded effects of climate and hunger when there is such an abundance of food available. This is a solvable problem,” he says.

Rogers’ background was in metallurgy—the study of the properties of metals. He took inspiration from metallurgists who discovered the chemical reaction to stop steel from rusting and wondered whether he could use a thin barrier to protect produce–in the same way a chemical barrier is used to protect the iron and carbon compounds that make up steel.

Rogers enlisted the help of college friends Lou Pérez and Jenny Du, two fellow UC Santa Barbara graduates, and the three of them got to work in his father’s garage, trying to create an edible coating that would keep water in and oxygen out of fruit and vegetables.

Rogers was convinced there was a way to use the peel of a lemon to sustain strawberries for longer, but he just wasn’t sure how. “I knew I didn’t want to synthesize something in a lab,” Rogers says. “I wanted to develop something that would work with nature, rather than against it.”

After much trial and error, which involved the team experimenting with various compositions made up of the lipids and glycerolipids from different fruit and vegetables, they finally found a formula that appeared to extend a strawberry’s shelf life for days. Their success prompted them to think of the bigger picture: “How would it ripple through the system? Instead of food going bad in days, it could now last weeks without refrigeration. That was big.”

The three friends applied for a $100,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with “a philosophy, rather than a product,” to develop a food-based coating that could be sprayed onto fresh produce. Using the hypothesis that food could be used to preserve food they won the grant. In 2012, Apeel—now valued at more than $2 billion and with investors like Katy Perry and Oprah Winfrey on board—was launched. Rogers was 27.

Today, Apeel is based in a 110,000-square-foot laboratory in Goleta, just a stone’s throw from the garage where it all began. Since launching its first product commercially in the US market in 2019, Apeel now offers FDA-approved coatings for four fruits and vegetables in North America—avocados, organic apples, limes, and cucumbers—and five in Europe—avocados, lemons, grapefruit, mandarins, oranges, and mangoes. The Apeel product is carried by around 40 retail partners, including Kroger, the UK’s Tesco and Asda stores, and Europe’s Edeka, Rohlik, and Eroski stores.

Apeel’s coating is a powder which is then dissolved with water. It is derived from discarded peels, pulps, seeds, and stems, which the company sources from numerous suppliers, including winemakers for leftover grape skins and seeds or sauce-makers for tomato remnants–known as feed. This feed would not have been used for human consumption, and so is spared from the landfill.

The coating is edible, completely natural, and works by slowing the water loss and oxidation that contributes to produce deterioration—it is made up of the materials that plants naturally produce to protect themselves. Apeel pulls the desirable properties from plant material and creates a barrier specific to each piece of fruit or vegetable. “We are at this unique time in human history where we don’t need to make something new, but we can instead identify the building blocks that nature has been using and reusing,” Rogers says.

In addition to working with stores to introduce Apeel-protected produce, the company partners with suppliers across the US, South America, and Europe, where its trademarked coating can be sprayed onto produce at the beginning of the supply chain. With thousands of tons of avocados being grown and consumed in the US—among the most thrown-away produce in the US—seemed like a good place to start.

Savannah Braden stoops over a wrinkled, darkened avocado, caressing its callused skin. “What have you lived?” she asks the fruit, pondering its previous lifetime before its imminent end on a lab table. Braden, the associate director of technology at Apeel, is nicknamed the “avocado whisperer,” for her fascination with the fruit.

“If you really spend time with an avocado, you can learn about weather patterns, extreme events. It’s really kind of amazing.”

The brightly lit corridor of Apeel’s Goleta headquarters runs through the building like an artery, laboratories branching off left and right. Each room is a hive of activity, scientists milling around clutching clipboards and trays of strawberries, peering over slides of smashed avocado, and squinting at computer screens displaying intricate webs of compounds. They’re working on their latest project: whether they can devise a coating that would keep certain nutrients from leaching out of fresh produce.

Apeel develops specific coatings for each piece of produce. The company’s work has been so pioneering that they have had to develop many of their own measuring technologies, and in 2021 purchased a company that focuses on hyperspectral imaging, so they can see inside a piece of fruit to determine how fresh it is.

Fruit and vegetables behave differently depending on where they are grown and when they are grown; there’s no one-size-fits-all. Each coating can take anywhere from six months to a year to develop for produce that behaves in a straightforward manner, or between three and five years for more complicated produce, for example, anything that’s fragile, like berries.

“We’re constantly seeking to figure out what else we are throwing away that we could potentially use,” explains Matt Kahlscheuer, a bioscientist who has worked for Apeel for the past seven years, heading up the research and development program. “For example, this fruit has great antifungal properties, how can we take that to protect a strawberry that goes moldy very quickly?”

Another branch off the arterial hallway leads to the impossibly bright photography room, where fruit is primped and prepped for photoshoots.

Each piece of fruit is lined on a white sheet of paper under tiny cameras which take hundreds of pictures as the fruit changes. “We can measure the shrink in produce over time, discoloration, and how the produce deteriorates. At the beginning of our work we knew Apeel was working but we couldn’t really measure how well it worked. If you just leave produce out on the counter and go back a few days later, you can tell it’s changed but you miss everything in between.”                                                    

This way, the team can watch in slow motion how produce degrades, day by day. “We wanted to know when rot onset, when colors started to change,” Braden adds. “And so by using this timelapse system we’ve been able to gather a lot of data and fill in the gaps.”

The R&D team consists of 10 engineers and scientists, with a further 30 in the company’s development team. In one lab, a begoggled scientist deftly chops up avocados, then pours liquid nitrogen over the fruit, the cloud of water vapor billowing across the sterile countertop.

Avocados oxidize very quickly, and freezing them this way preserves their properties, meaning they behave like a pre-cut avocado, giving the scientists an opportunity to study their potentially valuable characteristics and compounds. In one corner lies a respiration chamber, monitoring the amount of carbon dioxide produced as fruit ripens.

“Because it’s not attached to a tree, it only has a certain amount of breaths left before it uses all of its carbon and it begins to decay,” says Braden. “Apeel dampens out that rate and basically extends how many breaths left it has before decaying. That’s a really important metric for us.”

Avocados are an especially interesting fruit for the team because of the way it ripens, and its protective skin.

“They’re the hardest to work with due to their biology,” says Kahlscheuer. “But there is so much to be learned from them that we don’t know yet. If we learn a lot about how avocados behave we can apply those learnings to other produce. From a technical perspective, avocados are the most interesting. But yeah, they’re difficult to work with.”

“Ripeness prediction is really difficult for avocados,” adds team member Juliet Nwagwu Ume-Ezeoe, explaining the team’s choice of focus. “Because they are so valuable, it is really a critical point for retailers.”

By the time an avocado is picked, shipped, and displayed at a store, it may only have a few days left until it spoils. Avocados treated with Apeel coating tend to achieve peak ripeness for four to six days, compared to the usual fleeting window of two to three days.

The only possible time to apply the coating is at the packing house, where produce is shipped once it is picked to be analyzed for quality control, then sorted, labeled, and packaged. Apeel had to convince packing houses that their product was instrumental in the supply chain—a difficult task, considering the agriculture  industry that is notoriously slow to change.

“The food industry is so fragmented it is incredibly difficult to modernize,” Rogers adds. “When everyone is optimizing for themselves and not the efficiency of the system as a whole, we end up with massive amounts of waste and very little incentive for anyone to change.”

Last year, Apeel began working with West Pak, an avocado packer that works with over 1,000 growers across California, Mexico, Chile, and Peru. Its packing facility is in North County in San Diego, where Apeel is sprayed onto avocados as they journey through the packing process, arriving straight off the trees in large crates, rolling down conveyor belts to be measured, weighed, coated with Apeel—about as thick as 110th of a piece of paper—and stamped with the Apeel label.

In West Pak’s end-of-year sustainability impact metrics for 2021, the company estimated 1.8 million avocados had been saved from landfill in retail stores, conserving 130 million liters of water, and avoiding 660 megatons of carbon emissions, the equivalent of planting 110,000 trees.

Once Apeel had its product ready for market, they faced a new challenge: how to get it onto shelves? Rogers quickly found there wasn’t a market for longer-lasting produce, with most businesses informing him that fresh food going bad quickly meant their customers came back for more sooner.

As a result, the company has had to prove that longevity actually boosts sales. A pilot scheme launched in 3,000 German stores owned by the Edeka Group found that selling Apeel avocados in store resulted in a 50% waste reduction, as well as a 20% rise in sales, according to statistics from Apeel and Edeka. Shortly after the scheme, Edeka signed on to carry Apeel avocados, oranges, and clementines across all of its stores. According to Apeel’s latest research, its produce is already having a significant impact on the climate, with a 10-25% lower environmental impact than non-Apeel produce. Its EU avocados, for example, withdraw 15.3% less water and use 12.4% less fossil resources than an ordinary avocado.

In 2020, Apeel announced Walmart would begin selling its Apeel-coated English cucumbers—a huge win for the company.

In spite of their business success, Apeel still had one last hurdle: convincing customers to buy a piece of fruit sprayed with a new, unfamiliar substance.

Education remains key to reaching shoppers, and is one of the focal points for Apeel moving forward. The company is investing in social media outreach, targeted marketing campaigns and in-store educational displays. Only time will tell if this will be enough to shift consumer awareness.

It’s nearly impossible to collect data on what food households throw away, but supermarkets do keep count, and Apeel has partnered with numerous stores across the US and Europe to collect data on food waste. They then use the data to determine which product to work on next—the team is currently developing coatings for berries, asparagus, and cherries.

“Our coating doesn’t yet address mold, and so we are developing methods of protecting produce from fungi,” says Kahlscheuer. He adds that the company is also trying to understand how Apeel’s coating impacts the nutrition of produce, and how it could be developed to preserve nutrition after a fruit or vegetable has been harvested. Research has found vegetables can lose up to 77% of their vitamin C within a week of harvest, while spinach can lose up to 90% within just 24 hours. The warmer the temperature, the faster the degradation. Scientists also believe that B vitamins similarly degrade.

There has been little development in the space Apeel is working in, although numerous tech start-ups have launched to measure and prevent food waste. Leanpath works in commercial kitchens by scanning food that’s thrown into the trash. Spoiler Alert works at the buyer and supplier level, using software to help manage and move inventory to save food from spoiling, which is particularly useful when unexpected surpluses happen.

The challenges of persuading key stakeholders to come on board with Apeel may already be taking its toll. An undisclosed number of employees were laid off in July and the company announced it would be scaling back operations after years of continued growth.

If there really is to be a significant difference made, Gunders adds, manufacturers will need to implement these technologies upstream before reaching stores in order to slow down the spoilage process sooner.

“[There’s] no incentive to worry about what happens after you’ve passed food on to the next link in the chain,” Rogers says of the flaws in the current food chain. “The food system is like a game of hot potato, but unfortunately the music always stops after the potato is thrown to the consumer. Some producers and retailers even think this is good for business.”

And, if Apeel’s scientists can figure out how to preserve nutritional value of fruit and vegetables, their product may be able to tackle far more than just food waste, such as retaining nutrition in fruit and vegetables, which could prove life-saving in countries affected by famine. The longer an avocado develops on a tree, for example, the higher its oil content. This could make a huge difference in regions where malnourishment is endemic, and to the 14 million children under five who suffer from acute malnutrition.  

The technology could drastically change the way people consume fresh food. “And that’s the key point,” Kahlscheuer adds. “Changing an industry that has been set in stone for so long.”

“We could unlock so much potential. In today’s world, food that goes to waste is just as valuable as food that is sold—and that’s a behavior we need to change.”