zirkulierBAR – REGION.innovativ

Inter-municipal acceptance of sustainable value creation from sanitary by-product streams

We recover nutrients from consumed food and return them to agriculture. The aim of zirkulierBAR is to establish a sustainable, regional circular economy.

The processing of faeces and urine into quality-assured recycled fertiliser is currently carried out at the treatment facility of our project partner, in Eberswalde. There, we are developing new plant components in pilot operation and evaluating quality parameters of the recycled fertilisers through a series of trials. At the same time, we are developing environmental and economic models and investigating not only the fertilising effect of these novel recycled fertilisers, but also their social acceptance in organic farming. We are developing framework recommendations on waste and fertiliser legislation and organising dialogue events with policymakers, business and wider society. Our transparent zirkulierBAR real-world laboratory attracts interested participants from horticulture, agriculture and fertiliser production, as well as from local authorities and businesses across Germany.

The zirkulierBAR project – Inter-municipal acceptance of sustainable value creation from sanitary by-product streams – is an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research project. Here, local authorities and forward-looking companies are working together with universities and research institutions to create a real-world laboratory for a sustainable regional circular economy in the fields of agriculture and water management. Within the Faculty of Landscape Management and Nature Conservation, research focuses primarily on the safety, quality and acceptance of humus fertiliser. Within the Faculty of Sustainable Economy, the komm:loop simulation game was developed in collaboration with Dr Markus Ulrich of Ulrich Creative Simulations as an innovative, game-based format for building (inter-)municipal expertise in the field of circular economy. All information and documents relating to the simulation game can be found on this website.