FertiCycle's Florent Kebalo presents to Master's Students at Paris Saclay University

By Florent Kebalo, ESR 11

On January 10th, 2023, I presented some results of my PhD work about the effect of bio-based fertilizers on lettuce productivity to master students in Soil Management and Ecosystem Services at Paris Saclay University, Palaiseau, France. The presentation was done throughout the course on waste recycling in agriculture led by my co-supervisor. The take-home message from my study was that the use of green-waste compost, food waste compost, or cow manure with either human urine or food waste digestate for lettuce production did not show any risk associated to nitrate content in leaves, heavy metal and pathogen contaminations. I also used the opportunity to give an overview of the FertiCycle project in which my PhD is involved and the Marie Curie programme that funded the project. Some fruitful discussions were done with regard to the potential of waste recycling for vegetable production in general, but also the conditions required to be a PhD student under the Marie Curie programme. It was great to see how interested, enthusiastic and motivated the students were.