ERC for Advancing Sustainable and Distributed Fertilizer Production

The ERC for Advancing Sustainable and Distributed Fertilizer Production (CASFER) will strive to solve one of the most pressing problems facing humankind: how do we feed the growing world population while protecting and sustaining our environment? CASFER will enable resilient and sustainable food production by developing next generation, modular, distributed, and efficient technology for capturing, recycling, and producing decarbonized nitrogen-based fertilizers (NBFs). CASFER will create a transformative engineered system that takes the US from nitrogen-cycle pollution to a Nitrogen Circular Economy (NCE), from a linear economy to a circular economy with multidimensional social, environmental, and economic growth. CASFER will capture and recycle nitrogen from waste to reach over 50% of the US NBF consumption. Instead of expending resources, energy, and money to deactivate diluted reactive nitrogen from waste streams, nitrogen from waste will be captured and recycled for crop production.