The Farmers Central Cooperative Society (FCCS) has teamed up with the pig breeders cooperative (KIM) and the milk producers cooperative (KPH) to work on working on a new project to recycle the nutrients in manure from animal breeding and use them as fertiliser in the fruit and vegetable sector. “We will even go beyond this to achieve a full circular economy, making full use of the resources in raw pig and cow slurry. On top of fertiliser: water, energy and carbon as soil improver, biochar, or fuel,” Christopher Ciantar, project coordinator tells us.
According to the project, 300,000 tons of slurry is discarded in Malta every year. There are currently very few solutions for dairy and pig producers, and so it is wasted. At the same time, fruit and vegetable farmers are paying high prices for fertilisers. Furthermore, as droughts become more and more common in this Mediterranean country, water is becoming more and more sought-after. The SYNECO project is working on a circular solution which could tie all of this together, however in order to achieve this, the different parties must work together.