Second-year of RTO Lithuania joint funding scheme initiative is here! This year three projects were selected for small scale initiatives under Green Deal topics.
The projects involve researchers from all three RTO Lithuania member-institutes – Center for Physical Sciences and Technology, Lithuanian Energy Institute and The Lithuanian Research Centre for Agriculture and Forestry.
BioDegra project is related to the development of biodegradable biofuel cells. One of the main goals of this joint project is to form large-area, inexpensive and biodegradable carbon-based electrodes, which will serve as anodes of microbial biofuel cells, that would be placed in soil where living microorganisms will populate these electrodes and will be involved into the generation of electricity. Later these electrodes will be decomposed by natural factors without leaving any hazardous pollution products. The electrodes will be based on ‘biochar’, which is recently used as a ‘green’ fertilizer in agriculture. The use of such biodegradable electrodes would also solve other ecological problem such as the eutrophication of the Baltic Sea and the accumulation of macrophytes on the coast, because ‘biochar’ will be produced from these macrophytes (project coordinators prof. habil. dr. Arūnas Ramanavičius, dr. Žilvinas Kryževičius and dr. Nerijus Striūgas).
ExtraIMTA project. Because of the growing population, the more efficient use of resources is needed. Fish is considered as an important and healthy food. However, more than half of fish stocks are fully exploited. Therefore aquaculture can help to fill the gaps. During inland aquaculture, huge amounts of water are used, that are rich in nutrients and need processing and for today is waste. Growing of algae in the “processed” water can lead to the waste- to resource transformation. Moreover, the algae may be used for different application: biofules, biofertilizers and other. The project will overall optimize the productivity and sustainability of Integrated Mul-trophic Aquaculture (IMTA) technologies and the extraction of valuable compounds and to bring together an interdisciplinary group of experts to explore the possibilities for further use of IMTA bioremediation components (project coordinators dr. Arūnas Stirkė, dr. Eugenija Bakšienė and dr. Liutauras Marcinauskas).
Third project – NUTREC. This project’s research objective is to determine how to recover the nutrients necessary for plants from secondary raw materials. Simulated wastewater containing nutrients (N, P) and biomass combustion ash will be used as a raw material to produce MgNH4PO4 (struvite). Process development would contribute to the strategy of reducing environmental pollution, materials sustainable use, and preservation of our planet (project coordinators dr. Karolina Barčauskaitė, Stirkė, dr. Marius Urbonavičius and dr. Ilja Ignatjev).
