Cultivation mushrooms produces a lot of waste. For every kilogram of mushrooms produced, about three kilograms of soil-like material containing straw, manure and peat is left behind. In the EU, this results in more than 3 billion kilograms of waste per year. 

Pablo Martínez and his team are developing a system to remove water from mushroom waste and turn it into pellets of organic fertiliser as part of their SmartMushroom project. “Once it’s pelletised, we can deliver it anywhere for agricultural use”, said Martínez. 

Their goal is to develop an environmentally friendly process that doesn’t use electricity or traditional sources of energy to power the drying. They are using some of the mushroom waste to produce biogas as a power source by optimising an ecisting production process that usually uses waste slurries from other agricultural processes. 

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