Human use of land and soils for food, fibre and bio-products is highly inefficient. On the one hand it degrades natural and agricultural land and resources, and on the one hand produces vast amounts of organic waste streams and pollutants, much of which is sent to landfill.
Funded by the Knowledge Exchange and Translation (Kx&T) Fund Award, this project responds to this inefficiency by assessing a novel organic recycling method and reuse pathways for regional and local councils, landowners, and businesses across the supply chain. The intended impact of this research is to demonstrate a viable and sustainable closed-loop process of organic waste recycling and reuse for land rehabilitation across the supply chain that can be transferred and implemented at scale across local government areas within Queensland and Australia. At scale, this process could make a significant contribution to local, state and national climate targets to reduce carbon emissions and waste to landfill and other associated environmental costs and to restore soil and ecosystem health to natural, urban and grazing lands in a way that provides socio-economic benefits to multiple end-users.
The output of the study will outline the economic opportunity of emissions reductions, efficiency gains, and stacked co-benefits as benchmarked against current organic waste treatment methods of waste to landfill and commercial composting.