Interpretive Summary: Circular bioeconomy approaches for livestock manure and post-consumer wastes: opportunities for biofertilizers and bioenergy

By: Maja Arsic, Adibe L Abdalla, Hongmin Dong, Laurence Loyon, Ana Paula Contador Packer, Chayan Kumer Saha, Buchun Si, David Meo Zilio, Barbara Renate Amon

Implications

• In our current linear economy, organic residue streams such as livestock manures, processing wastes, and post-consumer wastes are largely managed with the main aim to prevent or limit human, animal and environmental health risks.
• Circular bioeconomy approaches aim to unlock the potential for these resources to produce multiple safe and viable products such as biofertilizers and/or bioenergy.
• This paper presents key outcomes from the chapter on livestock manures and post-consumer waste management of the FAO Livestock Environmental Assessment and Performance publication for “Integrating Circular Bioeconomy Approaches in the Environmental Assessment of the Livestock Supply Chains”.
• Adoption of circular bioeconomy technologies and products relies on coordinated action between technical, socio-economic, and governance, policy & regulatory entities.

Introduction

There is increasing interest in circular bioeconomy practices, technologies and products at the intersection of the circular economy and bioeconomy practices that promote more sustainable economic models, functioning within planetary boundaries (Muscat et al., 2021; Rockström et al., 2024). Circular bioeconomy approaches can recover a suite of products from some of the largest organic residue streams in livestock systems and supply chains (Ramirez et al., 2021) including: manures, processing and post-consumer streams (e.g., wastewaters and municipal sewage). While manures and post-farm gate consumer wastes are becoming increasingly regulated to prevent or limit environmental pollution (e.g., nutrient leaching and runoff, greenhouse gas (GHG) and ammonia emissions, emerging contaminants), circular bioeconomy approaches aim to shift away from waste management towards safely and efficiently valorizing these streams for the resources they contain (Sommer et al., 2013; Sigurnjak et al., 2020; Sutton et al., 2022) (Figure 1).

Read more in Animal Frontiers: Advancing the Circularity of Livestock Production.