A 'Solid Circle

摘要

There's a problem with the disposal of domestic biosolids (around 10m tonnes in the EU annually). Disposal at sea has, thankfully, been banned, and disposal in landfill severely restricted. At the same time, the biosolids contain invaluable materials. There's a global scarcity of phosphorus for fertilisers, leading to an over-reliance on "hotspots" of supplies, such as Morocco. There can be scaremongering over the threat from the scarcity of phosphorus - the unavailability of fertilisers and plummeting levels of food supplies - which is an exaggeration of the realities involved. There are various estimates of the global phosphate resource; however, realistically, the true figure is largely unknown.