Environmental benefits from the use of the residual biomass in nurseries

•Every year nurseries cultivating ornamental trees have to manage about 40 t/ha of residues, causing additional impacts on the environmental.•Nurseries determine environmental pressures, because of the consumption of electric energy, plastics, peat, fertilisers, etc.•Adequate yards for residues management and successive reuse guarantee savings for GHG emissions and fossil energy requirement.

Every year, nurseries waste about 40 t of residual biomass for each ha of potted plants cultivation. The European nursery sector deals with about 90,000 ha of cultivated land and 120,000 ha of nurseries, with a turnover of 19.8 billion Euros in 2011. In recent years, a number of Italian projects highlighted that GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions for the nursery sector range between 37 tCO2eq/ha/year and 45 tCO2eq/ha/year for potted plants, mainly due to the consumption of electric energy, plastics and peat. Moreover, other studies analyse the impacts associated to nurseries, recommending best practices for energy reductions and waste recycle or reuse. Therefore, the present work focused its attention to the possible environmental benefits associated to the reuse of residues (wood and substrate) of potted plants that are discarded from the nursery production chain. GHG emissions and fossil energy requirement were quantified by considering the CO2eq (CO2 equivalent) and the CER (cumulative energy requirement) respectively, in order to assess the environmental impacts of two different scenarios proposed for the materials recovery. Final results highlighted that the solutions which are able to recover the substrate and the wood allow impact reductions compared to landfill disposal. In particular, the scenario consisting in the immediate separation of the substrate from the root-plant system and the successive chipping of wood for energetic reuse, allows higher savings than those obtainable through shredding and subsequent wind separation. Moreover, for what concerns the CO2eq, an adequate use of the residual biomass make it possible to compensate the GHG emissions of the nurseries up to 15%.