The final stakeholder conference showcased the 30 months of work to boost Circular Economy in the agri-food sector

Our project AgroCycle, focusing on the application of circular economy concepts to agriculture, is reaching the end. It has been a long and very interesting journey for CEMA and our members, and a pleasure to have the opportunity to collaborate with all the project’s partners.

Just to mention some of the activities in which CEMA and our members have been involved lately:

  • in 2017 Fabienne Seibold (John Deere) made a presentation at the Agri-Food Waste Day Conference (Brussels, 17th of October 2017);
  • in 2018, selected CEMA experts from different companies (Strautmann, Samson Agro A/S and 365Farmnet) joined the SYSTEMIC – AGROCYCLE Policy Workshop on “Fertilising products based on animal manure under the nitrates directive and circular economy” (Brussels, 30th of May 2018).

Moreover, CEMA Secretary General presented the project during several occasion, just to mention some: Copa-Cogeca Congress (Linz, October 2018), EIMA Fair (Bologna, November 2018) and SIMA Fair (Paris, February 2019). Eventually, plenty networking activities have been ensured by CEMA Secretariat staff, who introduced the project to other European projects’ members, such as for: Biorescue project, ENABLING, RUBIZMO, Smart-AKIS, IoF2020 and Fairshare. The last of this opportunity was held at the Biorescue Final project conference “Towards a circular agro-food industry”, held in Brussels on the 4th of April 2019 and organized by Greenovate! (if you want to know more about this event, you can download all the presentation HERE).

AgroCycle final stakeholder event was held in the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine facility in Backweston, near Dublin, on March 29th with the participation of many relevant companies from the agrifood industry such as PepsiCo, Carbery, IRIS, and Manor Farm.

The event ended with closing remarks from Commissioner Phil Hogan who underlined, in his video statement, the crucial role played by circular economy projects in the European Commission’s strategy for producing more, while using less. Hogan explained that to feed the growing population, we urgently need to reduce the amount of waste produced by our economies, and in particular by agriculture, which is responsible for about 700 million tons of waste/ year. Hogan had already opened the kick-off event of the project in June 2016.

 

WATCH PHIL HOGAN'S SPEECH ON YOUTUBE!

 
The event represented a perfect opportunity to launch the Agrocycle Platform, one of the latest project’s results. The website is accessible to the public and represents an opportunity for industries to get informed about the circular economy and, as also mentioned by Commissioner Hogan in his speech, it includes an online platform for trading agrifood waste, that will be tested in Ireland in the next future. The platform was developed with the collaboration of UCD, IRIS, CEMA and Maynooth University and incorporates a dedicated space for teachers who want to educate the young generation on collecting and valorising food waste. There has been a very positive and welcome reaction to the platform from external stakeholders in industry and education, as well as from the EU Commission, that welcomed the holistic approach of our project. 

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As part of the Agrocycle Kids mission, the Agrocycle Kids rap was performed live at our final event on March 29th. Follow @agrocycle_kids on Instagram to discover more activities now and after the end of the project. 

The project achieved very good coverage by local, national and European sources of news media, in particular Dr Tom Curran (UCD) was interviewed by several radio stations. 

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