ИСТИНА

Turning Waste into Product: Focus on Phosphorus Alexei Solovchenko1,2 and Ladislav Nedbal1 1IBG-2: Pflanzenwissenschaften, Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Germany Phone: +49-2461-61-4461, E-mail: l.nedbal@fz-juelich.de 2Faculty of Biology, Moscow State University, Russia E-mail: l.nedbal@fz-juelich.de Phosphorus is a finite non-renewable resource, a major nutrient for plants, and a foundation of modern agriculture. Currently, agriculture almost exclusively depends on phosphorus extracted from phosphate rock that is non-uniformly distributed, with large deposits limited in a few countries. The global food and feed production depending on the shrinking phosphate deposits in geographically and politically limited areas threatens to generate socioeconomical volatility of dimensions that may well exceed that in fossil fuels. The efficiency of phosporus usage today hardly reaches 20%, with the rest ending in waste water or carried away by runoff from fields to rivers and to the ocean. The phosphorus available in waste waters is being already now precipitated, but often in a form that cannot be recycled to agriculture. As an alternative, the potential of microalgae to accumulate large phosphorus quantities is considered to close the cycle from waste, back to agriculture. In that, the potential of algae for a luxury phosphorus uptake can be combined with the benefit of delayed release of phosphorus from the algal biomass when applied as a fertilizer to soil. Technology of large scale algae cultivation has made a tremendous progress in the last decades being stimulated by perspectives of biofuel production that does not compete with agriculture for arable land and fresh water. The complementarity of algal biotechnology and agriculture can be further enhanced by synergistic effects achieved if the algal infrastructures are also used for solar-driven recycling of phosphate and other nutrients from waste water to crop plants. The algae plant AUFWIND in FZ Jülich represents a unique opportunity to test three commercially available bioreactors in this role. As a fourth alternative, we explore a new FZJ-proprietary design concept: the Closed Thin-Layer Photobioreactor that will also be shortly introduced in the lecture.