BIN2BEAN

In Europe, soil degradation is a critical environmental, social, and economic challenge. In this context, soil improvers obtained from bio-waste can support soil restoration and the transition towards the regeneration of soil systems while fighting another widespread issue: the landfilling and incineration of waste. The EU-funded BIN2BEAN projects seeks to empower cities in their transition towards healthy soil by optimising the valorisation of bio-waste into soil improvers. Through three Living Labs, the project will establish a participative strategy, mapping local contexts and solutions and evaluating the safety as well as the environmental and socioeconomic impacts of soil improvers. This data will be harnessed to create a scoring system, enabling end-users to select the most suitable solutions. Innovative business models for promising solutions will push their market update.

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

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