In Bangladesh, Pumpkin Plus transforms rural lives through the innovative technology of growing crops on chars.

KURIGRAM, Bangladesh –

Bangladesh sits on the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta, crisscrossed by the Padma, Brahmaputra, Meghna and Karnaful rivers. Though rivers have long been lifelines for the communities setting up shelters along their shores, the past decades have brought about destructive change. Riverbank erosion has cost the local population their homes and agricultural lands threatening their food security, and livelihood.

Mosammad Apruza is one of those locals. Married at 16, and now mother to three children, Apruza makes a little over $100 per month as a farmer in Bongram village located on the Brahmaputra river bank in Bangladesh’s Kurigram district, one of the districts most affected by river erosion.

*^{Pumpkin Plus farmers work in a sandy field in January.}*

Riverbank erosion causes people to lose land—and to then move house. When the water recedes, a temporary landmass of riverine sand and silt called chars emerges. This newly exposed land typically belongs to the Bangladesh government. In some cases, there are land disputes where people have official documents showing the land originally belonged to them. Since the lands are shifting due to river erosion, the original land records don’t always match. In those unsure cases, the government often leases the land to farmers for agricultural purposes.

*^{In Bangladesh, chars, or shifting landmasses of riverine, sand, and silt, are home to millions of people.}*

Apruza has long been growing fruits and vegetables for her family on these transitional sandbars; she sells any surplus to make extra money. It has been a meager supplement, but last year, she got a bit of good news. She was invited to join an innovative project from the World Food Programme (WFP) and Bangladesh-based non-profit National Development Programme in partnership with Pumpkin Plus—an agribusiness company that aims to transform rural lives by increasing the production of farming on the chars.

Nazmul Islam Chowdhury, an agriculturist by training, founded Pumpkin Plus in 2018 and is the organization’s CEO. The idea came to him over a decade earlier, when he was walking with some local children on char land in 2004 during his association with non-profit Practical Action. “When I saw the end of the embankment close to the water channel, it suddenly struck me that it was possible to grow crops on this and make it profitable for farmers,” he recalls. A year later, he started supporting farmers through Practical Action; through the next decade, their objective sharpened to help farmers steeped in poverty grow high-nutrition crops such as pumpkin on sandbars during the dry season.

*^{Pumpkin Plus founder A.Z.M Nazmul Islam Chowdhury travels with villagers by boat to visit the pumpkin fields.}*

Sand, of course, is not fertile land. The innovation of Pumpkin Plus lies in its planting technique. Farmers dig a 1×1 foot pit filled with a combination of silt and 10-12 kg of cow dung. This helps the pits retain water and become temporarily fertile to grow crops. They then plant pumpkin seeds that Pumpkin Plus sells them. And from October to April, the sandbars bloom with pumpkin.

The first stage is laborious, and often threatened by climate disasters, including sudden sandstorms and floods. But the technique has proven resilient: In the case of sandstorms, for example, Pumpkin Plus helps farmers protect the crops with plastic sheets that stabilize saplings so strong winds can’t uproot them.

Chowdhury describes growing pumpkins on sandbars as a “fight against poverty.” His conversations are peppered with pumpkin recipes. “I call pumpkin a golden magic ball, and a vehicle for change. It is high in nutrition and can be added to a variety of dishes in our local cuisine to fight poor nutrition levels,” says Chowdhury. Bangladesh ranks seventh in the world among countries most affected by the climate crisis, and the country is severely affected by food insecurity. According to the WFP, 40 million people in Bangladesh suffer from hunger, and 11 million from acute hunger.

*^{A farmer inspects his pumpkin field. Pumpkins are particularly hardy crops that can grow in difficult conditions.}*

Each disaster left us poorer and more devastated. When the organization gave us a demonstration that we could grow pumpkins in pits and earn a living, I could not believe it was a possibility,” Apruza says. But the results were impressive: “I earned around 45,000 BDT ($410 USD) in one season of growing pumpkins.” Apruza is just one of 1,895 smallholder agri-entrepreneurs that have been trained by Pumpkin Plus in the last five years.

The earnings have helped Apruza diversify her income— she now also raises cows and earns money from selling their milk. The day we visit Apruza, first at her work site, and later at her home, she shows us a new pumpkin she had harvested. “It will see me through the next three days,” she says. “I will add it to my fish curry today, and make vegetables with it on other days.”

While other crops can be grown on sandbars, Chowdhury notes that pumpkins are particularly hardy and can be easily stored. But he’s also realized that farmers benefit from rotating their crops and experimenting with other vegetables like squash. “Hence the ‘plus’ in our company name. We have to keep reinventing with time,” says Chowdhury.

*^{Farmer Mossamat Afroja holds up her son, and a pumpkin.}*

That includes expanding beyond just farming. Pumpkin Plus’s current scope of work involves typically procuring seeds and then selling them to farmers at a price lower than the market rate, and, when possible, facilitating the sale of pumpkins. It also provides consultancy services to government bodies, profitable organizations, and nonprofits. “We pivoted to a business model as this is the way this innovation can be scaled up and made mainstream,” says Chowdhury. “A commercial venture would mean this innovation can be replicated and made profitable nationally and in cross-boundary ventures.”

Thirty-two-year-old Mohammad Rabiul Islam’s story is one of resilience, and something of a success story for Chowdhury’s mission. As a teenager, Islam migrated from his village Taluk Shahbaz in Rangpur district to the southeastern city of Feni, over 450 km away. He worked in other people’s farms, earning around 4,000 BDT ($36 USD) a month—paltry compared to the amount of money he now makes as a farmer. In 2010, he saw that people in his village were growing pumpkins in the char. He decided to give it a shot.

An emotional Islam recounts how growing pumpkins helped his family fight poverty. “We were steeped in poverty as a family. Now, things are different,” says Islam with tears in his eyes. He credits Chowdhury for teaching him the technique of sandbar cropping and changing his life under his mentorship.

Over a decade later, Islam now has over a dozen daily wage laborers working on his field during the busy season. He pays female daily wage laborers 250 BDT ($2.28), and men 420 BDT ($3.83) per day (gender discrimination is still an issue in the labor force). He advises his neighbors on pumpkin seeds, and also facilitates the market sale of other farmers’ pumpkins at a marginal profit.

*^{Day laborers transport bags of rice in Char Udne.}*

Last year, a viral disease impeded Islam’s pumpkin production. But instead of simply submitting to this turn of bad luck, Islam decided to do his own research, spending 70,000 BDT ($638) on seeds, plus fertilizer and labor. He sold his pumpkins this year for 0.6 million BDT ($5,468). “The profit is almost double of what I earned last year,” he notes.

Most importantly, Islam became a leader through the viral disease crisis. “This year, I purchased a different variety of seed and have had no issues so far. I also introduced other farmers in the area to the new seed varieties,” says Islam.

For Chowdhury, the primary objective of Pumpkin Plus had always been to “help people help themselves.” “Now, our main objective is imparting hands-on knowledge to them and making them future leaders,” he says.

*^{A farmer with Pumpkin Plus holds up a pumpkin she grew.}*

Scaling up has brought some challenges, though. While a viral infestation on a crop is determined by multiple factors, a few farmers who bought seeds from Pumpkin Plus reported their produce suffered from a viral disease. Pumpkin Plus suggested a replacement, but farmers, beholden to market demand, were keen to continue with the same variety. Chowdhury took up the issue with the seed supplier, and the farmers will be switching seeds in the next season. “We will be closely monitoring the production, and take accountability for this,” he says. “We have also informed the company in Thailand from whom we procured the seeds via an importer.” These are important steps; the long-lived project relies on the trust of the community it serves.

For Apruza and other female farmers, the focus now is on expanding their production. They want to have steady incomes to supplement their husbands’ incomes, says Musammad Nurnahar Begum, who has three children.

“If we were eating one time in the past, we hope to have two meals a day in the future. We want our children to study well. We want to have enough money someday to be able to relocate to the city for a better future for our kids,” she says. “These are our aspirations.”

“Magic” Mushrooms: Nature’s arsenal of bioherbicides

In 2007, retired U.S. Navy surgeon Dr John Sands was volunteering at a hospital in Maseno, western Kenya, treating one severe malnutrition case after the other. Frustrated by the futility of treating patients in such advanced stages of malnutrition—and confused since there was no shortage of fertile fields around—Sands asked his longtime friend Florence Oyosi, an agronomist, what was happening. She brought him to a field of purple flowers and introduced him to Striga. Sands thought, “I know just the guy for this.”

^{Farmer and Kichawi Kill evangelist Victoria Nafula examines her crops at her farm in Akwobait Village.}

That guy was his brother, Dr David Sands, a plant pathologist at Montana State University who has always been, according to his daughter Claire Sands Baker (now Director of the Toothpick Project), an “out-of-the-box thinker.” Among his many paradigm-shifting scientific discoveries, the one that led to The Toothpick Project was his decades-long research on Fusarium oxysporum (“FOXY”), a soil-borne fungus. Over 200 forms of FOXY are highly selective, attacking only one specific plant. It is a natural arsenal of potential bioherbicides.

The challenge was developing a FOXY strain that would kill Striga but not its hosts. Sands’ first step was to find African scientists to lead the effort, a search that led him to Sila Nzioki, a plant pathologist at the Kenya Agricultural Livestock Research Organization. Together with Oyosi, Nzioki collected samples of wilted Striga in Maseno and found 17 different FOXY strains already in their roots. The Striga had succumbed to naturally occurring FOXY, killed by certain amino acids the fungus excreted. Nzioki and Sands identified which amino acids were deadly to Striga only and found a key trio—L-leucine, L-tyrosine, L-methionine—that they combined into FOXY-T14 (“T” for “trio,” 14 for 2014). This is the active ingredient in what would, after Kenyan regulatory approval, become The Toothpick Project’s commercially distributed product, Kichawi Kill.

In 2013, The Toothpick Project ran field trials with 500 members of Oyosi’s farmers’ group, called the Liberty Farmer Initiative. The results were so astounding that Nzioki, Sands, Oyosi and Baker squinted at the spreadsheet: FOXY-T14 increased crop yield by 56% in the long rains planting season and 42% in short rains. Yields increased in 499 out of 500 plots. “That’s better than chemicals,” explains Pam Marrone, former CEO of agricultural biologicals company Marrone Bio Innovations. “They have a nearly perfect win rate, and you don’t see that very often!”

^{Claire Sands Baker from the Toothpick Project talks with Lillian Makokha, a Village Inoculum Producer of Kichawi Kill, at her home in Bungoma County.}

In these field trials, they tested FOXY-T14 alongside the other main Striga control solution on the market: StrigAway, a seed coated with—and bred to be resistant to—the chemical herbicide Imazapyr. But while farmers must purchase StrigAway every season, FOXY-T14 persists in the soil, attacking Striga’s seeds generation after generation. After a few consecutive seasons using FOXY-T14, farmers reported Striga disappearing altogether. Unlike the chemical herbicide, the non-toxic rice inoculum does not require gloves, plus farmers can use whatever seeds they like—zone-specific and drought-resistant seeds, or even saved seeds. Kichawi Kill is a bioherbicide tailor-made for smallholder farmers.

^{Victoria Nafula addresses a community gathering about the Toothpick’s Project Kichawi Kill in Akwobait Village}.

Toothpicks and Rice: Getting FOXY-T14 into the hands of farmers

In April 2018, The Toothpick Project director Baker officially registered its Kenya company, Toothpick Company Limited. Headquartered in Kakamega, Toothpick Company currently serves seven counties in western Kenya, where Striga is most prevalent, employing a team of eight and running on an operating budget of $160,000. Its aim to serve smallholder farmers has given Toothpick Company a mission to develop a farmer-centric approach to marketing and distribution. Farmers themselves perform the role of production sites, Kichawi Kill evangelists, planting instructors, and Striga educators.

In the Kakamega lab, the FOXY-T14 mycelia are introduced to a substrate, which looks like a toothpick on a petri dish, hence the organization’s name. The secondary inoculation is done by village inoculum producers (“VIPs”), almost all of whom are farmers themselves and 80% of whom are women. The live FOXY-T14 are introduced to buckets of cooked, cooled rice, and after three days of incubation, the inoculum—a brownish, pungent rice mixture—is ready to distribute to farmers at 300 KES ($2.35) per bucket. The farmer coats each maize seed with the inoculum before placing it in the soil.

Beyond Kichawi Kill: A sustainable platform for bioherbicides

Although much of the world relies on chemical herbicides, these substances have proven harmful to ecological and human health. As of May 2022, for example, Monsanto has settled over 100,000 glyphosate (RoundUp) lawsuits related to its carcinogenic effects, doling out more than €10.3 billion ($11.3 billion USD) in damages and fines. Despite the evident need for bioherbicides, the technical challenges of biological solutions can dissuade investment.

^{Victoria Nafula prepares to plant maize on her farm in Akwobait Village in Busia County.}

“There hasn’t been a new mode of action discovered for herbicides—meaning a new class of herbicides—in 20- to 30 years,” says Marrone. “Innovation has been low on the chemical side, yet everyone wants to get away from chemicals. Finding biologicals is really important right now.”

Baker, for her part, sees the Toothpick Project as “a bioherbicide platform for the world.”. The point is not to stop at Striga hermonthica in western Kenya, Baker says, but to create building blocks for the development of other bioherbicides. They will, in turn, be able to tackle food insecurity, biodiversity loss, pollution and toxicity in a variety of contexts. “That’s the global idea of the innovation of a bioherbicide,” she says, “all dependent on host-specific virulent Fusaria.”

For all of its future global potential, however, the most important metric is visible within the changed fortune of a single family. After a couple of consecutive good harvests, Lillian Makokha has built a new house on her homestead, its new corrugated metal roof still crisp and gleaming. The long rains are coming soon. The soil of her tilled fields lay waiting, face-up in the hot sun. She’s ready for the flood of Kichawi Kill orders she’ll receive once it’s time to plant. “This year, we thank God,” says Makokha. The curse is gone.

^{Lillian Makokha displays Kichawi Kill’s inoculum at her farm in Bungoma County, Kenya.}

The world’s first rice standard

The SRP secretariat is located in Bangkok, Thailand’s bustling capital. Co- found in 2011 by the IRRI and the United Nations Environment Programme, and with over 100 research and private sector partners, the SRP is the world’s first rice standard. For a food that is so widely consumed, it’s a bit odd that it took so long to standardize its production in a sustainable way.

Wyn Ellis, Executive Director of SRP, points out there have been longstanding efforts to make perceived high-value crops like coffee or cotton more sustainable. “Rice, on the other hand, is considered substantially less sophisticated, and so it’s overlooked despite a larger carbon footprint,” he says. The danger of that oversight can go in two directions, he says. Rice can harm the planet while itself “becoming a victim” of global warming.

One hectare of rice crop, if farmed with constant flooding and chemical fertilizers, can emit up to 300 kg of the potent greenhouse gas methane. SRP aims to reform the global rice sector to help improve the planet, the product, and the people who farm it.

But to do this, the rice value chain had to be redesigned from beginning to end.

The details that matter

The SRP standard covers eight areas split into 41 separate indications to assist farmers in sustainably growing and harvesting rice. Farmers are advised on everything from farm management and pre-planting to water use, nutrient management, and integrated pest management. Best practices, such as including drying time in post-harvest (which has been shown to ensure the highest quality grain), are encouraged.

Thanu Thanhakij, who oversees nearly 150 rice farmers in his role at the Ban Don Mu Community Rice Center in Ubon Ratchathani, adopted the SRP standard in 2018 to astonishing results. “Only direct seeding, rather than sowing over the field as in the past, saved us 80% of what we paid for seed,” he explains. “We saved 60% off the overall cost. Rather than flooding the field for an entire month, alternate watering and drying saved us 50% of the water and yielded more rich grain. Land studies enable us to have custom-made fertilizers and determine how much we need. There’sno reason to waste money on fertilizer we don’tunderstand. We now have cash left in our pockets.”

The standard also addresses health and safety criteria for farmers, including personal protective equipment, pesticide and chemical storage, and disposal. While it may seem initially daunting, farmers choose which of the 41 indicators they can realistically meet, and SRP assigns a compliance score based on their selection.

Farmers, for example, will score two points if they do not use pesticides. If the farmer used pesticides but followed the SRP guidelines while doing so, they would receive one point. The use of pesticides without training results in a zero.

Based on self and group evaluations, farmers evaluate themselves. Farmers earning 33 out of 100 points are “working toward sustainable rice cultivation;” those who receive 90 points have “sustainably cultivated rice.”

Crunching the numbers

SRP has 506 SRP-verified trainers working with over 150,000 farmers in 39 countries. In 2022 alone, SRP verified just under 130,000 tons of paddy rice from more than 30,000 hectares in India, Pakistan, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Spain. This year, Ellis and his colleagues intend to double all those numbers. But their work doesn’t end with a fancy product label. “We’re not here to flash another certificate,” Ellis explains. “We’re here to make sustainable change.”

Only rice that meets the highest level of “the SRP Assurance Scheme” can leave the nation of origin as SRP-verified rice. Developed in 2020, the SRP Assurance Scheme comprises three degrees of assurance based on different evaluation demands and levels of robustness. Rice farmers and farmer organizations can select between self-assessment at Level 1 and second-party verification at Level 2.

Those who passed Level 3 audits conducted by independent third-party auditors are allowed to use the SRP label on their products. SRP-Verified rice is now accessible on retail shelves in 20 countries, including Denmark, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. SRP’s marketing team in Europe works closely with food retailers and organizations, including Lidl, Costco, and Walmart, to put SRP rice on shelves.

Success and Challenges

Shahid Tarer, Managing Director and CEO of Galaxy Rice, one of Pakistan’s biggest basmati rice exporters, has shipped 15,000 tons of his SRP-verified rice to the European market in the last four years. He first learned about SRP in 2015 and was immediately enamored. Dealing with farmers, though, was a longer process.

“That was difficult in the beginning,” he recalls. “We informed farmers about this novel approach and gathered them to work together. It was tough. I remember the third year when we weren’t sure if we could pull it off.” Despite early reservations about changing their habits, more than 600 farmers he works with use SRP.

The Loc Troi Group, Vietnam’s rice trading leader, first piloted the SRP standard with 150 farmers on 450 hectares in 2016. They’ve since expanded to 3500 farmers throughout the Mekong Delta on 11,000 hectares. Loc Troi Group has supported hundreds of farmers to reach the perfect score of 100 points on the SRP scale.

“However, consumers knew little about sustainable rice,” explains Tran Nguyen Ha Trang, Deputy Director of the Loc Troi Agricultural Research Institute Loc Troi Group. “SRP market investigation and promotion are essential so that consumers are willing to pay for healthy rice that is good for the environment and community.“

Looking forward

Next year, SRP and a host of partners will launch rice farmer finance operations in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Their mix of policy and market- oriented solutions has been successful wherever they have expanded. In 2019, the Sustainable Rice Landscapes Initiative used the SRP as its “replicable and scalable” tool to help them measure and manage 4.2 million hectares in South and Southeast Asia to reduce 116.2 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

But its impact on individuals is most strongly felt. Back in Ubon Ratchathani, Banjong notices the first farmer in her village starting to harvest in preparation for the upcoming wet season. The rest of his neighbors will soon follow. Banjong is proud of her sustainably cultivated rice. Just as importantly, the money she has saved from SRP farming goes toward her three young grandchildren’s schooling. She’s building a bright future for them and a safer, more sustainable world around them.

More on Sustainable Rice Platform

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

he 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 in the 18th century 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 by- product 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.

^{A piece of crystallized phosphate salt, or monoammonium phosphate, at the EasyMining laboratory in Uppsala, Sweden.}

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.

The largest share of the world’s phosphorus reserves—around 70%, according to the latest US Geological Survey—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.

^{A sample of the recovered phosphate product generated by EasyMining’s “Ash2Phos” process.}

“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 environ- mental 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.

^{Väderholmens Gård, the old Sellberg family farm, dating back to the late 1800s, and now the headquarters of Ragn-Sells Group.}

^{Left, Jan Svärd, CEO of EasyMining, and right, Erik Sellberg, owner and chairman of the board of Ragn-Sells Group.}

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.

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.

^{View from the rooftop of Ragn Sells’ Ash2Salt treatment plant at Högby- torp—a waste and energy recycling center northwest of Stockholm, Sweden.}

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.

^{Stockpiled fly ash, which is cleaned and treated at the Ash2Salt plant to recover commercial salts.}

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.

^{A sample of incinerated sewage sludge, from which clean phosphate is recovered through the Ash2Phos process.}

^{Ehsan Mosleh (front), EasyMining lab and pilot engineer, and Sara Stiernström, product manager (right) at EasyMining’s Uppsala laboratory.}

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.

^{Ragn-Sells’ training facility at Sätra Gård, adjacent to the Ash2Salt treatment plant at Högbytorp.}

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.

^{Testing facilities at the Ash2Salt plant, which is projected to be operational in 2022.}

^{The silos of the Ash2Salt plant at Högbytorp, which will take in fly ash to be cleaned and treated.}

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. Still, 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 meat of the problem

Why is a Protein Challenge needed in Southeast Asia? Global meat consumption has nearly doubled in the past 30 years from 174 to 337 million tons. Nowhere has this been more pronounced than in Asia, where demand rose by 63% between 2000 and 2019. That figure, by comparison, is less than 8% for North America, Europe, and Latin America.

^{Muhammad Ibnur Rashad uses upcycled shampoo bottles (some acquired from a partnership with L’Oreal) and a mesh made from natural fibers to grow herbs and greens}.

“A big proportion of that growth accrues to China and India…but it also comes significantly from Southeast Asia, from countries like Indonesia and Vietnam,” says economist Shivin Kohli, who studies alternative proteins at tech-focused consultancy Access Partnership. “Population booms and burgeoning incomes are vital factors,” he says.

By 2030, Asia will be home to 65% of the world’s middle class. “Eating meat is somewhat of a status symbol in this region,” he says. Growing income levels will lead to an 80% increase in protein demand by 2050.

Meeting those rising protein demands without radical changes in the farming system is more than a consumer issue. It’s also about climate change. For example, Asia lost 100,000 hectares of mangrove forest—an important global carbon sink—between 2000 and 2012, with shrimp production accounting for 30% of this loss.

“We definitely know that this region is going to be one of the hardest hit by the climate crisis,” says Dhanarajan. Four Southeast Asian countries — Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam — were among the top 10 countries most affected by climate change in the past 20 years. If left unchecked, climate change could shave off 11% of the region’s GDP by the end of the century, alongside a 50 to 70 cm rise in sea levels, which would threaten 77% of South- east Asians who live in coastal areas along low-lying river deltas.

Embracing the complexity

The shift to alternative proteins—those produced from plant or animal cells, especially those made in a climate-agnostic manner in labs, might help buffer some of these threats. Plant-based alternatives to beef would release up to 87% fewer greenhouse gas emissions and require 75% less water and 95% fewer land resources. The launch of vegan and vegetarian plant-based products has quadrupled in the region since 2016. But these are often spearheaded by well- funded startups. There’s a risk they may crowd out Southeast Asia’s smallholder farmers, who currently produce more than 80% of the region’s food.

^{Madhumitha Ardhanari is the principal sustainability strategist of Forum for the Future and part of the core team of the Protein Challenge.}

While various innovators are working hard to enact changes to the existing food system, they lack the proper focus, says Dhanarajan. Many are too intent on achieving quick fixes—solutions that ramp up protein production to meet growing demand and curb food insecurity at the environment’s expense. “There’s also a tendency towards linear and siloed thinking, whereas the protein system is incredibly complex,” she says.

^{The Forum for the Future at their weekly team meetings in Singapore.}

“The proper response to this complexity,” says Ardhanari, “is collaboration.” Her team has organized two workshops for nearly forty Protein Visionaries across various sectors. She says they designed these events to “support collaboration between changemakers” and begin piloting interventions for change. Forward thinking is a considerable part of these sessions. Ardhanari and her team encourage participants to imagine what the region’s protein system might look like in 2050—and what role they could play in its transformation.

“When you say to someone: ‘It’s not just about producing a really cool soy burger. Can you actually solve the problems of the protein system in Southeast Asia?’ Clearly it’s a big question,” says Dhanarajan. “Our job is to transform this overwhelm into one where people feel inspired and say ‘We can do this.’”

“The trick,” she says, “is to break down the overarching aim into small, actionable steps.” Her team helps participants identify critical points in the system where they can intervene and generate the most impact. They also encourage innovators to think about the bigger picture, such as whether they can source plant-based raw material from smallholder growers to help support the latter’s livelihoods.

However, quantifying the initiative’s tangible results three years on is difficult. “When you’re working with systems changing, it’s got a long tail to it, so you don’t necessarily see your impacts straightaway,” says Dhanarajan.

Significantly, the initiative has already helped establish channels for cross- disciplinary collaboration—one of the key aims the team laid out from the beginning. “No organization, however innovative or powerful, can create the change needed alone,” says Ardhanari.

^{Sumi Dhanarajan, Managing Director of Forum for the Future and the Protein Challenge, in Singapore’s Hort Park, a center for gardening education and activity.}

For Soil Social’s Ong, this collaboration was the biggest boon. “The resources are there, but because it’s such a huge problem to tackle, it’s all a bit fragmented,” she says. “For example, I’m working on a regenerative solution. But I may not always know who to talk to to move that solution forward, be it test-bedding in certain countries or working with farmers or finding the right financial capital. [They] have the network to connect us.”

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