Farming is responsible for 3-5% of GreenHouse Gas emissions (GHG). A high percentage of this results from using inorganic synthetic fertilizers such as Urea, globally a 1.5 gigatons/ year. The challenge with synthetic fertilizers lies in their fast water solubility where only 30-50% of these nutrients (nitrogen, phosphate, potassium) are absorbed by plants, this is a very low efficiency. While the rest of these nutrients are volatilized as ammonia and nitrous oxide (GHG) and leached to underground water (nitrate). The UK Farm to Fork Summit and EU Green Deal aims to reduce the environmental impact of agriculture by decreasing fertilizer losses by 50%, reducing mineral fertilisation use by 20 % by 2030, and improving nutrient use efficiency by 40%. in B-Chemltd, we recognise the need for more efficient and eco-friendly fertilizers that minimize emissions without compromising crop yield. B-Chemltd is motivated to introduce _Ferti-Green-coating_, a new biodegradable and soil-friendly polymer from sustainable resources, to coat synthetic fertilizers to increase efficiency and plant uptake while decreasing GHG emissions. In this project and in collaboration with Rothamsted Research, we will study the feasibility of using our _Ferti-Green-coating_ to produce cheaper polymer-coated fertilisers, with high nutrient-use efficiency to reduce pollution.

Agriculture applications are responsible for 3% of the energy consumed worldwide, 2% of these are used to produce inorganic fertilisers such as Urea. Due to the high solubility of these fertilisers in water, unfortunately, 70% of these fertilisers are leached fast from the soil in a few days and lost as pollution in the air and underground water leaving crops with only 20% of nutrients. Several products in the market were used to decrease the fertiliser fast leaching using a slow release chemical mechanism and by coating the fertiliser grains with water-resistant polymer and waxes. Currently, the coated fertilisers in the market were produced using a fossil-based expensive polymer which results in the expensive price of the final product (4-5 times the price of Urea), this limited the massive use of these coated fertilisers as well as concert about the effect of the use non-biodegradable polymer that was found to be toxic and accumulates in soils. In Biotica Ltd we invented a plant base polymer resin to coat fertilisers that is cost-effective and biodegradable and can extend the lifetime of fertilisers in soli for 6 months. This will decrease the final cost for farmers, decrease the pollution resulting from leaching and decrease the consumed energy for fertiliser production with less CO2 emission.