Backgorund:
Intensive livestock farming has greatly affected the use of manure to replenish the soil, leading to the accumulation of macro-nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, and heavy metals (in particular, copper and zinc), and consequently to the increased risk of water and atmospheric pollution. Animal farming is responsible for odorous substances (ammonia) and emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) such as methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (NO2).

The anaerobic decomposition of organic material in livestock manure releases methane. This occurs mostly when manure is managed in liquid form, such as in lagoons or holding tanks. Methane emissions could be reduced by adopting more effective manure management practices or biogas collection. Biogas production from anaerobic digestion of animal manure and slurries is an effective way of reducing GHG emissions.

Livestock waste management in Cyprus is particularly important since several piggeries, poultry and other livestock farms are in operation. However, management practices are inadequate and uncontrolled waste disposal is common. The size of the island and the location of populated areas have meant that such practices have affected the supply of water for irrigation and residential use.

In some countries, some manure is separated and the solid fraction dried and exported. The liquid fraction may be treated and discharged and/or applied to crop land. The challenge for Cyprus is to link manure management, and especially its treatment, to overall farm management. Manure management and treatment must be compatible with livestock and crop production plans, rather than being separate considerations, so that the benefits of manure management and treatment offset the economic costs to the farmer. At present, standardisation in the design of facilities that treat anaerobic supernatant produced from the treatment of the Organic Fraction Municipal Solid Waste (OFMSW) is under development. To aid this development, it is initially necessary to assess the performance of alternative treatment options.

Objectives:
- Develop, demonstrate and evaluate an integrated system for the treatment of livestock waste. The developed prototype system will be installed at a premises where livestock waste is readily available to be used as raw material in the anaerobic digestion unit. The system involves several advanced, integrated processes for the sustainable treatment of livestock waste. These processes consist of anaerobic digestion (AD) for the treatment of livestock waste for biogas production; a sequencing batch reactor (SBR) for the treatment of the liquid stream produced from the AD, resulting in high quality effluent that can be reused for several purposes; composting for the treatment of the solid stream, and an odour-abatement system for the elimination of volatile organic compounds (VOCs)and odours from the process;
- Introduce and implement innovative solutions for livestock waste management with a low carbon footprint;
- Recover materials and energy from livestock waste to produce reusable effluent;
- Develop and disseminate a strategic plan on sustainable decentralised livestock waste management in line with EU and national legislation;
- Develop and identify concrete market opportunities for the end products; and
- Develop and demonstrate an innovative assessment tool integrating the principles of LCA, cost-benefit analysis and the current legislative framework for the evaluation of system performance and end-product quality.

Expected results:
- Identification of livestock waste production sources;
- An integrated methodology for effective livestock waste management;
- High-quality compost and treatment of effluent phosphorus;
- Minimisation of the environmental disturbance resulting from the production, treatment and disposal of livestock waste;
- Reduction of greenhouse gas emissions;
- An assessment tool for the environmental and socio-economic evaluation of the livestock waste management;
- A strategic plan for the integrated management of livestock waste in EU countries;
- Assessment of the environmental impact and the burden on climate change from current livestock waste management practices.

Urban water activities - extraction, waste water treatment, drinking water treatment, transport and distribution etc. - are essential to ensure both a reliable supply of drinking water and compliance with quality regulations when discharging water to water bodies. However, all the processes involved in the urban water cycle also have environmental impacts, as they consume electricity and chemicals and generate waste.
There is, therefore, a need to improve understanding of the existing balance between the environmental and health benefits of the different activities of the urban water cycle with their environmental impact. A life-cycle approach is needed to ensure that the overall environmental cost-benefit of urban water activities is positive. But it is not sufficient to consider just one environmental indicator, such as the carbon footprint, over the life cycle. Environmental performance assessments should include all the significant impacts related to the activities involved throughout the urban water system. This knowledge will help decision making to assess, for example, whether it is worth improving water quality at the expense of increasing the consumption of energy and chemicals.

Calculation of the most competitive technologies and chain supplies for European tannin foams based on sustainability and technico-economic criteria. For this, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) will be used for primary production of tannin-based insulating foams and end of life use as bioenergy (through syngas production) from the bark of important European Tree Species.

BAMMBO will provide innovative solutions to overcome existing bottle-necks associated with culturing marine organisms in order to sustainably produce high yields of value-added products for the pharmaceutical, cosmetic and industrial sectors.
BAMMBO will screen and identify target marine organisms for potential as sustainable producers of high-added value molecules (HVAB's). Our project will apply analytical methods for the extraction, purification and enrichment of bioactive compounds. A life cycle analysis of the production pathways developed in the project will be undertaken to evaluate the sustainability of production applications.

Two European Directives on ambient air quality assessment (96/62/EC of 27 September 1996 and 2008/50/EC of May 2008) obliges the Member States to deliver periodically precise information about the air quality and the related health within their territories to ensure that the European population is aware of it.
For compliance to both Directives, States usually use monitoring stations, but these stations are only useful when macro-pollutants are assessed in agglomerations. For measurement of other pollutants included in the Directives there are technical difficulties and their analysis on air is too expensive. As a consequence there is a lack of representative data through Europe. In addition, data from automatic devices are accurate but too limited in number of pollutants and to describe spatio-temporal trends of pollutants.
Due to the limitations of traditional methods, bio-monitoring is an adequate alternative to acquire data about the levels of pollutants that affect European citizens and makes it possible to evaluate the state of environmental parameters influenced by synergistic effects of d ifferent p ollutants. Among the available bio-monitors, terrestrial mosses are especially adequate for air quality assessment due to their high efficiency in loading both particulate and gaseous determinants of organic, inorganic, and radioactive pollutants. However, there are some problems that can arise when using mosses for the current moss-bag technique: the absence of well-suited moss species living in urban, extra-urban, and even indoor reference environments; the bags are prepared from mosses naturally grown in unpolluted areas, so its availability and the natural variability on moss elemental composition could vary depending on n atural a nd a nthropogenic causes.
The solution to avoid these problems is to cultivate in the laboratory a moss clone to always have homogeneous material with the same initial concentrations to prepare the bags. In this way, a high degree of standardization would be reached and would allow a comparison of the exposed mosses in the same way by means of Enrichment Factor or Net Enrichment. An additional, but highly relevant problem that usually affects the use of biomonitors is the lack of standardized protocols and methodologies. The lack of such protocols hampers comparison of the results obtained in different studies, and sometimes limits the conclusions that can be reached. The MOSSCLONE approach would overcome all these issues, thereby improving data quality and reproducibility, and therefore usability of environmental data c ollected t hroughout Europe.

The main MOSSCLONE objectives are:
1. Selection of moss species on the basis of their use as bio-monitor, their distribution and their physico-chemical characteristics.
2. Creating a pilot bioreactor for the cultivation and the selection of the most suitable species.
3. Characterization of the selected moss clone.
4. Scaling up moss clone cultivation.
5. Design and methodological standardization of the moss-bag technique.
6. Moss-bags validation versus current state-of-the-art methods for air pollution monitoring.
7. Perform an initial validation of its usefulness for the detection of atmospheric small scale pollution focus.

Partners:
University of Santiago de Compostela
Ecotoxicology and Plant Ecophysiology research group (Department of Ecology, Faculty of Biology)
Group of Environmental Engineering and Bioprocesses (Department of Chemical Engineering)
University of Freiburg
Department of Plant Biotechnology (Faculty of Biology)
University of A Coruña
group of Applied Analytical Chemistry (QANAP)
AMRA Scarl
AMRA Scarl is an entirely public
T.E. Laboratories Ltd.
Orion S.R.L.
Biovía Environmental Consultant
TecnoAmbiente S.L.
Maderas Ornanda S.A.
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
The laboratory ’Géosciences Environnement Toulouse of the French CNRS
The Université Paul Sabatier Toulouse.

FENIX – Giving packaging a new life” is a 3-year project funded by the LIFE + Programme of the European Union which started in January 2010. Its purpose is to help municipalities and other territorial groups from Spain and Portugal in managing packaging waste in a sustainable manner, according to the principles of European policy on waste management. To this end, it aims to develop a software tool flexible and easy to use that contributes to the valuable results of regional groupings Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) of packaging waste management, integrating environmental, economic and social issues.

Plant polymers are the main source of renewable materials in Earth. The use of biotechnology will permit to develop new routes for cellulose and lignin-based added value products, including speciality paper products and surfactants. Oxidoreductases are involved in both lignin biosynthesis and biodegradation. Therefore, they have the highest potential for modification of lignocellulosic materials and isolated lignins. However, the natural enzymes are far to optimally operate under industrial conditions. Some oxidoreductases have been extensively investigated in terms of structure-function relationships. This will allow a new approach based on tuning their site-directed mutagenesis. The applications of tailor-made enzymes will include among others: i) increase of stregth and other properties of cellulose fibres, and improve refining; ii) production of lignin.free cellulose for high-quality products; iii) production of lignin-based surfactants (as dispersants and nano-emulsifiers) and adhesives. In this way, the IP will contribute to maintain the EU leading position in the market of industrial biotechnology. The potential impact is illustrated by the turnover of the EU Paper-Forest cluster that attains 400.000 million euro/year. In this way, the IP will contribute to transform a part of the EU chemical sector to more sustainable and eco-friendly manufacturing processes.

This project is therefore developed aiming to transfer EU expertise and practical experiences on the carbon footprint analysis and management of food products to build up the capacity of Thai food industries in preparation for adopting the carbon label so as to facilitate low-carbon trade between EU and Thailand to contribute to climate change mitigation.
http://www.carbonlabelthaifood.sci.ku.ac.th/

Among the special activities promoted by the Ministry of Education and Science, the National Network was founded with the basic objective of facilitating the contact and exchange of opinions and research within a framework of collaboration between organizations, institutions and companies interested in knowledge and application of Life Cycle Analysis. The network has been coordinated by our research group.