Waste Biopolymers for Eco-Friendly Agriculture and Safe Food Production

This work addresses environmental problems connected with biowaste management, the chemical industry, and agriculture. These sectors of human activity cause greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in air, climate change, leaching excess mineral fertilizers applied to soil into ground water, eutrophication. To mitigate this problem agriculture, controlled release (CRFs) are made by coating granules synthetic polymers produced from fossil-based industry. strategy aggravates GHG emission. In present work, six formulations containing sunflower protein concentrate (SPC) a new biopolymer (BP) obtained oil cake hydrolysis municipal biowaste, respectively, commercial urea were tested as CRFs for spinach cultivation against control growing substrate Evergreen TS Osmocote®. The results show large differences plants’ nitrate concentration due different treatments, although same nitrogen amount is added all trials. BP key component mitigating accumulation plants. plants grown substrates together SPC and/or urea, exhibiting relatively high total N uptake (47–52 g kg−1), have significantly lower nitric ratio (9.6–12.0) than that (15.3–16.5) shown but no BP. data confirm composites yield safest crop coupled biomass production. Replication effects will contribute development biobased industry exploiting biowastes feedstock.