Making the most of water and urban waste

Considering different needs of a territory, different functions expected from biorefining systems by local actors (stakeholders and interested parties) at the earliest design stage, taking into account the necessities for flexibility and modularity, develop the adaptation capacity of biorefining systems to potential (r)evolutions, and even their capacity to be transformed.

Some insect species such as the black soldier fly (Hermetia illucens) can grow on a wide variety of organic substrates ranging from “noble” by-products (wheat bran) to waste such as pig slurry (Singh & Kumari, 2019). This capacity is now seen as an ecological way to recycle some biowaste.

The management and reuse of urban wastewater must go beyond the treatment of water and recycling in an industrial context or use for irrigation on farms. If wastewater is to be incorporated into urban ecosystems, the entire small water cycle needs to be redesigned, from identifying all available resources in a territory to characterising all uses and their associated constraints to all the socio-technical systems that allow water to be treated, transported, stocked and (re)distributed.

Our consortium wishes to investigate the engineering of agricultural and food waste in a logic of circularity of flows on the scale of a large urban area, including the Saclay plateau and the plain of Versailles. We wish to explore the issue in an interdisciplinary manner, including 7 units from 4 INRAE divisions.

Entomoconversion in a circular bioeconomy approach

This project is designed to study urine recovery in territories via an innovative extraction process for use on farms, and examine how the implementation of such a structure would impact sanitation services.Separating and recovering urine at the source is of particular interest for increasing the circularity of nutrients, notably nitrogen and phosphorus since urine consists of 86% nitrogen and 60% phosphorus per person.

Understand the interactions between the activities that produce, process, value and consume biomass in a systematic rather than sectoral way, and account for the dynamics of the water, energy and land resources that underpin these activities

CARIBOU is an exploratory project that brings together skills in social sciences, humanities, environmental assessment and technology to help develop bread recovery sectors.

Material and energy flows between town and country, questioning agri-food systems: relocation, non-food uses of biomass, opposing soil artificialisation, etc.