Nutrient Trading - not the way forward for a circular economy
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stephen.j.hinton
Apr 6, 2016, 6:32:04 AM4/6/16
to Sustainable Phosphorus Platform
Hellcom, the Baltic Sea region cooperation platform has looked into putting Market Based Instruments to work to prevent eutrophication of the Baltic.
http://www.nefco.org/sites/nefco.org/files/pdf-files/nefco_bs_nts_gsn_final_report_20080229.pdf
It's old, but an interesting read. Firstly, it represents the "do less bad and use financial incentives so people can earn from playing the margin" approach which is an unfortunate, in my humble opinion, starting point.
Nutrients flowing into the Baltic represent a systemic failure, not just many individual releases, and should be treated that way. In other words, the study is a request to ignore the circular economy.
The flow of nutrients is an indication of systemic disconnects including that land is less than ecologically mature, that prices of P and N are such that is cheaper to import rather than recycle, that the system for recycling and recovery is not working, that green jobs are secondary to import, and possibly even dietary and food choice imbalances that translate to agricultural practices that mimic ecologically immaturity.
The idea of trading exchanges looks at the wrong end of the "pipe".
There are encouraging examples from USA and Canada where city officials permitted waste water utilities to emit higher levels of nutrients as long as they sold abatement certificates to farmers and land managers downstream. The farmers adapted their land to nutrient recovery using wetlands etc.
It made a lot of sense. Nature recovers P and N much better than any industrial process. And the cost of abatement was half that of the estimated cost of raising the treatment plants' performance. It created jobs and in at least one case, it created a recreational space as an added bonus.
This is what farmers are for, to maximise ecological services, not just mass producing food.
There is a second aspect. It is now possible to dredge up (net) all the nutrients that you put in. The way the Baltic works is that nutrients "slide" into deep (dead) areas from where they can be recovered. This applies to lakes along the way, too. There is' a growing case for letting go of our love of waste water treatment industrially to a high level instead to let natural water bodies process the effluent. (See the fact sheet attached from Teknikmarknad.se)
Looking forward to your comments /Stephen
http://www.nefco.org/sites/nefco.org/files/pdf-files/nefco_bs_nts_gsn_final_report_20080229.pdf
It's old, but an interesting read. Firstly, it represents the "do less bad and use financial incentives so people can earn from playing the margin" approach which is an unfortunate, in my humble opinion, starting point.
Nutrients flowing into the Baltic represent a systemic failure, not just many individual releases, and should be treated that way. In other words, the study is a request to ignore the circular economy.
The flow of nutrients is an indication of systemic disconnects including that land is less than ecologically mature, that prices of P and N are such that is cheaper to import rather than recycle, that the system for recycling and recovery is not working, that green jobs are secondary to import, and possibly even dietary and food choice imbalances that translate to agricultural practices that mimic ecologically immaturity.
The idea of trading exchanges looks at the wrong end of the "pipe".
There are encouraging examples from USA and Canada where city officials permitted waste water utilities to emit higher levels of nutrients as long as they sold abatement certificates to farmers and land managers downstream. The farmers adapted their land to nutrient recovery using wetlands etc.
It made a lot of sense. Nature recovers P and N much better than any industrial process. And the cost of abatement was half that of the estimated cost of raising the treatment plants' performance. It created jobs and in at least one case, it created a recreational space as an added bonus.
This is what farmers are for, to maximise ecological services, not just mass producing food.
There is a second aspect. It is now possible to dredge up (net) all the nutrients that you put in. The way the Baltic works is that nutrients "slide" into deep (dead) areas from where they can be recovered. This applies to lakes along the way, too. There is' a growing case for letting go of our love of waste water treatment industrially to a high level instead to let natural water bodies process the effluent. (See the fact sheet attached from Teknikmarknad.se)
Looking forward to your comments /Stephen
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