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Description
Every drop counts in soilless crop production as the intensive use of fresh water and the release of nutrient-rich effluents (drain water) negatively impacts the environment. Besides, this drain water is a valuable resource because it contains high contents of nitrates and phosphates. ALGACYCLE will re-use drain water to produce microalgae, which will be fractionated into water extracts and residual biomass. These fractions will be used as biostimulants for plants or feeds for aquaculture.
ALGACYCLE tackles, in five activities, the challenges of re-using drain waters, namely: (A1) project management; (A2) defining operation parameters for cultivating winter and summer algal strains using drain water; (A3) developing low-cost microalgal production, harvesting and cell disruption approaches at pilot scale; (A4) developing biostimulants and aquafeeds as novel, sustainable (bio-) products; and (A5) evaluating the environmental impact and business potential of the ALGACYCLE innovations.
ALGACYCLE joins three Portuguese SMEs (Necton, Hubel Verde and FulgurIT) and three research institutions, from Portugal (Algarve University) and Norway (Nord University and NIBIO) with concomitant goals: (i) Necton aims to replace unsustainable and costly fertilizer for algal production by gratis drain water, and to develop new algal-based products for the biostimulants and aquafeeds market; (ii) Nord University aims to advance research for replacing unsustainable aquafeed ingredients using microalgae; (iii) Algarve University aims to advance research on algal-based biostimulants for crop production; (iv) Hubel Verde aims to improve growth and quality of raspberry and avocado production using algal-based biostimulants; (v) FulgurIT aims to extents expertise towards automatization solutions of microalgal cultivation; and (vi) Nibio aims to deepen research on phytohormones in algal extracts.