”Not only rich people should be able to buy eggs in the future”

On 5 October, the first in a series of symposia on “Visualising a greener Harmonized System” was organised by the World Customs Organization, WCO, in Brussels (in hybrid format). The objective of this symposium is to look at how the classification of goods can support environmental policies and thereby support sustainable development.

As one of the keynote speakers, Pär Larshans, Director of Sustainability at Ragn-Sells Group and Co-chair of the International Chamber of Commerce Working Group on Circular Economy in Paris, was clear:

- If we are serious about creating a sustainable society, we have to start using the raw materials we already have – over and over again. As the world’s population keeps increasing, recycling nutrients is crucial to our ability to feed everyone without ruining the planet.

Mr. Larshans, along with the European Commission’s David Kozik and the Food and Agriculture Organization’s Marcio Castro De Souza, were invited to provide input to the dialogue at the first of five symposiums held on 5 October at the World Customer Organization, WCO, in Brussels. The theme was: Expanding food horizons - recognizing agricultural diversity for sustainable global food security.

All three speakers addressed the importance of food production from aquaculture, which today accounts for 49% of the world's current food production. When it comes to implementing circular solutions, there are innovations available today that could increase food production, but they have difficulties reaching the market due to current and upcoming legislative frameworks and trade rules.

- To ensure that not only rich people can buy eggs in the future, we need to implement circular principles on how our macronutrients are sourced. We need principles based on quality and not origin to be implemented in trade regulations, says Mr. Larshans.

Mr. Larshans presented a total of six existing solutions for the recycling of critical raw materials, such as nutrients, that can support the transition to a circular economy and contribute to food security. By 2100, if we don’t start to recirculate phosphorus, there will be more or less only one reserve in the world that can be mined, the one in Marocco/Western Sahara. However, this deposit is contaminated with high levels of cadmium and uranium that we do not want to use for food production.

- Free trade regulations are today one of the biggest blockers when we try to “mine” from our urban flows in order to transform from a linear to a circular society, even research and pilot trials are very complicated to conduct and as a result, it reduces the interest to invest in a circular development, says Mr. Larshans.

You can find the presentations from the symposium here.

For further information, please contact:
Pär Larshans, Director of Sustainability, +46 70 927 29 63, par.larshans@ragnsells.com
Emma Ranerfors, Press Officer, +46 10 723 24 16, press@ragnsells.com 

FACTS: The six examples of circular solutions for food security
The following six examples were showcased by Ragn-Sells during the WCO symposium, focusing on the challenges of how to implement them if no policies or trade regulations are adjusted. Each of these solutions will support the transition to a circular economy and contribute to food security by producing enough food within our planetary boundaries.

• Havbruk. How to capture fish sludge in fjords or coastal regions while avoiding the risk of eutrophication and simultaneously produce energy and extract nutrients (phosphorus and nitrogen) from the collected sludge. [Read more]
• OSA project, by using CO2 as input and combine it with CaO, the leftover will then be able to be used to enrich the soils, including several important minerals. [Read more]
• Wastewater treatment plants need to be transformed into future resource plants to enable production of nutrients and energy. [Read more]

Solutions from Ragn-Sells innovation company Easy Mining:

• Ash2Phos, to produce a high-quality phosphorus nutrient with sewage sludge as the origin [Read more]
• Ash2Salt, extraction of potassium with household waste as origin. [Read more]
• Aqua2N, a circular solution that extracts nitrogen from wastewater and directly produce a nitrogen fertiliser. [Read more]

Read more:
www.fao.org/home/en 
www.wcoomd.org/
iccwbo.org