The FORBIO Project: a sustainable alternative for contaminated and underutilized lands

The FORBIO Project: a sustainable alternative for contaminated and underutilized lands


The FORBIO (Fostering Sustainable Feedstock Production for Advanced Biofuels on underutilized land in Europe) Project gave stakeholders in Italy, Germany and Ukraine a strategy for the market uptake of sustainable advanced bioenergy value chains. Through a thorough assessment of the real sustainable potential for bioenergy in these countries, the project contributes to meeting the mandate of the European Renewable Energy Directive II.

Started in January 2016, the Horizon 2020-funded project FORBIO was proposed by a consortium of 12 partners, including FAO, and used the GBEP Sustainability Indicators for Bioenergy as the basis for assessing the sustainability of using underutilized lands for the production of advanced biofuels without interfering with the production of food or feed, nor with recreational or conservational roles of the land. The project placed strong emphasis on the collection of site-specific data, introduced a number of innovative concepts and measures, while relying on most popular and trusted assessment tools, such as the GBEP Sustainability Indicators for Bioenergy.

Despite being taken out of their natural context, the GBEP Indicators proved effective, once tailored by FAO staff to respond to the needs of the peculiar case represented by contaminated and underutilized lands. This has been the case of Italy, and specifically the case of the south-western corner of Sardinia. This part of the Country, vastly more renowned for its unparalleled natural beauty than for the presence of large extensions of contaminated land, is actually home to one of the most detrimental industries of the country: the mining and aluminium industry in the Sulcis province.

For decades, lead, cadmium, zinc and other heavy metals have been dispersed over the once flourishing agricultural land in the surroundings of the Municipality of Portoscuso. This has forced the Mayor of the little industrial town to restrict the production of food or feed in his territory in order to avoid unpleasant consequences for the citizens’ health.

The project demonstrated the potentially beneficial role that dedicated bioenergy crops, such as giant reed or smilo grass, could play in cleaning up the contaminated soils while supporting the local economy and contributing to fill the tanks of European drivers with highly sustainable bioethanol.

In fact, most of the environmental and social indicators returned enviable scores when compared with the current situation. In fact, the greenhouse gas footprint of second generation ethanol produced on these lands with the selected feedstock could even be half that of any traditional bioethanol production. That is, provided that the enzymes needed for the breaking of sturdy cellulose bonds in the 200,000 tons of biomass digested each year, are produced on site using the excess heat and power from the biorefinery itself. 

Farmers would regain the right to cultivate their own lands, while generating employment and much needed income. Soil functions would be restored at a faster pace than if the fields were left idling, and organic carbon could be stored in a stable manner in the ground. Biodiversity would also be potentially affected positively, because healthy soils provide habitat for a number of organisms. Also above ground, the project proved the potential benefits for a number of animal species, especially mammals and migratory birds.

Unfortunately, as is the case in general when discussing advanced biofuels, economic sustainability is often undermined by inefficiencies of the local and/or international market. To overcome these bottlenecks, FORBIO prepared tailored strategies for all three case study countries to guide stakeholders along the pathway to enhance the market penetration of the advanced bioenergy potentially produced in Italy, Germany and Ukraine. The strategies have been presented during the FORBIO Final Workshops in November 2018 along with detailed roadmaps that streamlined the roles, responsibilities and the timeframes that each stakeholder, including the European Commission, the National Governments and the local public and private stakeholders should adhere to in order to achieve and share the benefits of the proposed biofuel value chains.

The good work of the FORBIO project, which ends in December 2018, will continue in a newly funded (again under the Horizon 2020 funding mechanism of the European Commission) project entitled BIOPLAT-EU also solidly anchored to the powerful GBEP Sustainability Indicators, which were recognized to be an asset for the assessment of sustainability of bioenergy in the European context.

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