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BRITQuests - find your bioresources

Topic outline

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    General

  • Welcome to the Bioresource Information Tool!



  • Quest 1 - Roadside Trees 🌳🌲

    The BRIT contains data of the roadside trees within the several cities in Germany. During the very first task you will be asked to find one tree on the street of your choice and some information about it.🌳 After that You will get a dose of knowledge📚 about bioresources and what can we do with them, so that after creating your own statistical data📊 you will be able to calculate and see the size of benefits from trees residues🍃. But let’s go slowly from the beginning…

    • Task 1 Find your tree 🌳🔎

      If you live or study within the borders of German cities included in the roadside trees map on the BRIT, find the tree near your home or university. If not, find the tree of Your choice to get some tree information ℹ️.

      Please find the instructions below. However, try to complete the task independently first. If you run into any issues, check the instructions for help🤗.

      The map of roadside trees in the BRIT contains data from various sources. For example, the data of roadside trees in Hamburg is comprised of two merged datasets:

      1. The Hamburg roadside cadastre, which is maintained by Hamburg's authority on environment, climate, energy and agriculture (BUKEA) and 

      2. the hamburg port authority roadside tree cadastre, which is maintained by the Hamburg Port Authority (HPA).

      It contains all locations of roadside trees in the city state of Hamburg including information about tree genus, year of plantation, stem circumference and crown circumference.

      All used sources are marked in the BRIT.
      Cool! You have found your own personal tree and additionally, some information about it. You should know that this tree produces leaves🍂 and is cut every once in a while, which results in green waste generation. But let’s stop for a moment and think… How much green waste can produce only one tree? Not so much, right? So now, in order to calculate some statistical data, you will be asked to find a specific number of trees in the region defined by You 🫵🏼.

    • Task 2 Find more trees! Define a region🌍

      The BRIT Tool allows the user to create and save its own region on the website, which can be used later on in the exercises.
      In the second task You will be asked to define Your own region with some specific parameters, namely the region containing a number of trees between 1000 and 5000.


    • remarks

      Great! Until now you have defined a region with a number of trees, which you will use in the later part. But let us stop here for a minute and think about bioresources produced by those trees 🧐.

    • What actually is a bioresource❓

      Bioresources are renewable materials derived from biological sources, serving as alternatives to fossil raw materials. They include high-quality primary materials from forestry and agriculture, such as crops and trees, used for food, building materials, paper, and base chemicals. Bioresources also include secondary, tertiary, and quaternary materials - by-products and residues generated during production and after product use. These can be food waste, straw, liquid manure, tree prunings, wood residues or others. 
      If you want to learn more about bioresources, there is a separate topic in the “Lectures for future” module. Feel free to check! - Lectures for Future

    • remarks

      What do you think? In our exercise we have growing roadside trees. They lose leaves every fall and they need to be cut every few years for road safety. If we want to work with residue-based bioresources, what will we take under consideration?

    • remarks

      At this moment you know that trees can generate green waste, which are our residue-based bioresources. Additionally, you have found your own statistical data. Now let’s check how you can make use of them.


    • One way to make use of tree residues, like leaves🌿 or branches🪵, which are part of green waste is to apply them to compost or biogas plants. What is happening with green waste added to biogas plants? Green wastes in our case especially leaves, together with other residues like biowaste or paper are decomposed by anaerobic bacteria and one of the products of anaerobic digestion is biogas - methane⛽💚. Whereas hard green waste like branches, which are not decomposed by anaerobic digestion, can be added to the compost to produce high quality fertiliser.

    • Task 3 Calculate biogas and compost produced by the tree residues from Your region! ♻️💡

      Now, after defining the region, You will calculate the biogas potential of the tree's residues (leaves) produced within Your region during fall. Moreover, older trees are pruned every once in a while, from which additional bioresources are produced (pruned material like branches). Taking it into consideration, You will also calculate the averaged compost production from those branches.

      Tree prunings contain branches, which are typically chipped. These wood chips are a good structure material for composting. Composting wood chips alone is not ideal, due to the lack of nitrogen and they should be mixed with another nitrogen-rich substrate. The same applies to the production of biogas only from leaves. It will not be the ideal process and it is necessary to add other substrates to increase efficiency and quality of the end product. Having this in mind You can still make a raw estimation of compost and biogas production. Use the assumptions below:

      Assumptions for biogas production from leaves: 

      Leaves produced by one tree → 70 kg/1 tree
      Biogas potential for 1kg of leaves → 95L/1kg

      Assumptions for compost production from pruned material:

      Amount of pruned material from one tree (older than 10 years) → 10kg/year
      Compost produced by pruned material → 50% of the mass.


    • As you can see, bioresources don’t need to be specifically grown🪴 but many residues🍂🪵 from other processes are generated and must be managed anyways. Making the shift from viewing these residues as waste🗑️ that is a cost to be disposed of, in many cases it makes sense to find a way to create value⛽ from them. 

      BRIT can help you get an overview about which bioresources are available in your region.

  • Quest 2 - Greenhouses

    In this second quest you will unlock a new tool’s module, namely "Inventories"📊! Here You will focus on the residues from greenhouses in the region of Nantes in France and their seasonal distribution. Moreover, You will learn about the problems of managing the bioresidues. But for now, let’s learn a little bit about the types of greenhouses and their characteristics📖.

    • In BRIT's map “Nantes Greenhouses” you can filter by the crop and additional 4 filter options to choose from: heating, lighting, production mode and culture management. Let’s go quickly through all of them:

      -Heating🌡️ of the greenhouses is not necessarily required but it increases efficiency and helps to keep the greenhouses in operation all year round.

      -Lightning💡of the greenhouses promote healthy growth and can increase crop yield. 

      -Production mode: inside of a greenhouse, the plants can be planted into the ground soil. We call that “on ground”. Alternatively, the plants can be placed on tables or platforms, for example potted. We call that mode “above ground”.  

      -Culture management, classic vs high-wire: in a high-wire system, plants keep on growing upwards during the whole season, which is especially preferred in case of cucumbers and tomatoes.

    • Task 1 - Find the difference between greenhouses for cucumbers🥒 vs tomatoes🍅

      In the first task try to find, which types of greenhouses are mainly used for cucumbers and which are for tomatoes. Check their number and the total growth area to compare with the answer at the of the instructions below.

    • remarks

      Ok! After a quick introduction to the greenhouses and their characteristics, let’s now focus on the bioresources they produce and go through a little study case📖! 

      First thing to do is to think about what bioresources do we get from vegetable greenhouses🍅🥒.


    • From the greenhouses with vegetables, especially tomatoes and cucumbers, the main residues are stems, leaves and of course some other wastage. Can you find this information on the BRIT? Of course you can😃! Additionally, BRIT gives information about the seasonal distribution of those waste for every month. To find this information you need to unlock the second module on the BRIT website: "Inventories"📊. See the instructions below to learn how to find the information about seasonal distribution of greenhouse residues.

    • Task 2 - What about seasonal distribution?

      Take a look at the seasonal distribution of greenhouse bioresources. How does it change and why? Why are there so many tomato stems in November, while the cucumber residues are more or less evenly distributed? 

      💡Hint: export the data from all the greenhouses to Excel (in the maps section) and look at the growth cycles.


    • Till now, you know about the bioresources from greenhouses and their seasonal distribution🌿🍂. In the previous quests with roadside trees🌳 you have learned one way of managing the bioresources (putting them into the compost or biogas plant⛽💚). Can we apply this idea here as well? Sure, we can but here comes the question. What about seasonal distribution? In November there are a lot of residues, which are highly biodegradable. While in December there are hardly any residues. We can build a biogas plant but there is no continuous flow of residues.

      Note that the same problem occurs with leaves we looked at in Quest 1 as it does with many bioresources. We just swiftly ignored it for simplicity of the first exercise.

    • Task 3 - Problem with non-continuous flow of bioresources 📊

      Think about problems that can occur due to the non-continuous flow of bioresources if we want to create biogas plants and give possible solutions.

      The answers You find in the remarks.

      The problem with noncontinuous supply of bioresources is designing a facility that satisfies the needs for every month. 

      1. One of the possible solutions is designing a bigger facility, based on the month with the highest inflow of bioresources. Thanks to that there won’t be a problem with space. BUT what about the other months, like December where we get hardly any biowastes? The facility would not have enough substrate during the winter. Moreover, building bigger facilities comes with higher investment costs.

      2. Another option is storage of excess substrate. However, greenhouse residues degrade very quickly so it’s not an option for a long period of time. The storage time of the residues could be prolonged by some kind of preservation method, such as cooling or drying, which is energy intensive and not efficient at all. If the local context allows it, another idea is to mix them another dry residue, such as wood chips from unpolluted post-consumer wood waste.

      3. The bioresources could be simply transported to another biogas plant as well, but with transportation comes additional costs and CO2 emissions, which is not a very eco-friendly and cost efficient sollution.

      These are just example answers so maybe You have come up with something else?

      As you can see, when problems in the bioresource management arise, there might be many different ways to approach them. More often than not, each approach has a downside, a tradeoff to the benefit of the solved problem. Which solution is the right one is not possible to answer generally. Instead, it is important to analyse the problem well and also take the context into consideration. Maybe there are other residues in the region that can be used as substrate for a biogas plant, when there are not enough greenhouse residues?

      BRIT is designed to help you with this process by providing and sorting information for stakeholders in a specified region that need to solve problems and want to make well informed decisions.

  • Quest 3 - Household Waste Collection

    In the third quest, You will discover the map with Household🏡 Waste Collection in Europe. You will learn the difference between different types of wastes and collection systems. This map contains huge amounts of data📚 about household waste collection within the several cities in Europe. We focused on the smaller region - Schleswig-Holstein together with Hamburg - in order to make some statistical analysis. Nevertheless, after these quests you should be able to do the same analysis within different regions of your choice as well😃.
    • On the BRIT, the map with household biowaste collection in Europe contains different types of waste as well as different collection systems. Let’s go quickly through all of them.

      Waste categories:

      -Green waste: In the households, those are the wastes from gardens, like soil, flowers, grass. Just remember that green wastes from the streets, like branches and leaves from the first quest, are collected and managed differently than green waste from private gardens. It is due to the different content of those wastes.

      -Food waste: food residues, can include both pre- and post-plate waste, which can be plant-based or animal-based, processed or unprocessed and partly avoidable or unavoidable.

      -Biowaste: food waste and green waste together.

      -Residual waste: Non-recyclable waste, which are not suitable for either glass, paper, plastic, nor the biowaste. In simple words, everything that cannot be recycled.

      Collection systems: 

      -Door to door: the waste bins are placed directly outside or near each household for easy collection.

      -On demand kerbside collection: 

      -Recycling centre: waste is taken to a facility managed by the municipality or a private entity, where citizens drop off their recyclables.

      -Bring point: waste bins are located in public areas, which may be 500 meters or more from households, where residents take their waste.

      -No separate collection: there is no special system in place for collecting certain types of waste.


    • Here, on the BRIT, on the details page, you find all the information about the collection systems that you just learned about and some additional statistics, which we will use later on.

    • Task 1 - Find your collection system!🚚

      Find the biowaste collection system in Your region.


    • As you’ve already learned, biowaste is a valuable resource and at the same time, really hard to manage. To make use of its potential, biowaste needs to be collected separately from other waste types. Depending on the context it might also be desirable to further separate green waste and kicthen waste. It is important to keep impurities as low as possible. There are different ways to do the separate collection. In many cases, this involves a separate bin that is collected by the waste management company. Biodegradable plastic bags are sometimes used to increase separation of food waste from residual waste due to its convenience. However, at the same time biodegradable plastic bags can increase impurities due to the wrong distinction between normal and biodegradable ones. Moreover, biodegradability of those plastic bags is a controversial issue, which is still under the testing phase. Reflect whether or not biodegradable plastic bags should be recommended or forbidden?

    • Task 2 - Where are biodegradable plastic bags allowed?

      Check the regions where it is allowable to throw out biodegradable plastic bags into the bins.

      Hint: advanced filters😉.


    • You’ve learned during the first quests with trees and greenhouses a lot about green waste separately. Now let’s move to the part with biowaste, where both, green waste and food waste are collected together. 

      Biowaste is valuable because it can be utilised for methane production in biogas plants. That’s why at the end of the 3rd quest you will study the spatial distribution of biowaste in the Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg regions to compare it later on with existing biogas plants.

    • Task 3 - Spatial distribution of biowaste in Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg

      Check the distribution of biowaste in the Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg region. Choose a year, for which there is the most data available. Calculate the amount of biowaste collected in tonnes for every district and total biowaste collected in Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg.

      Hint: You don’t need to click on all districts of S-H to get the information. You can use the excel export. The data given in excel is “specific waste collected”, check the units. You want to have values in t/year.


    • After calculating the amount of biowaste produced in every district, you will compare the amounts of biowaste collected with the capacity of the existing biogas plants. Take a look at the map and table below, representing biogas plants in S-H and Hamburg region and their capacity, calculate the overall capacity and try to do a quiz.



    • As You can see, even if it was possible to provide all of the biowaste from Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg region to the surrounding biogas plants, the number of wastes collected exceeds the sum of all biogas plant capacities. It means, if we want to put all the biowaste to the biogas plants, we need to create new ones?

    • Task 4 - New biogas plants?

      Is it a good solution to build new biogas plants so that all of the biowaste could be managed there? If yes, where could they be built?


    • It is always a good solution to introduce biowaste to biogas plants and produce biomethane, but actually have You considered that 40% of biowaste is avoidable? If we reached a perfect situation, a goal , where 40% of biowaste is reduced, we wouldn’t need that many biogas plants anymore. Avoidable biowaste is often kitchen residuals, food leftovers. If we, people, managed our food more reasonably and didn’t waste any food, 40% of total biowaste would be avoided. However, on the other hand, around 60% of the residual waste is also food waste. If we recycled the wastes in the right way, 60% of residual waste would go to biowaste. One situation decreases the amount of biowaste, the other increases.


    • Managing the bioresources is not only looking at today's problems and investigating what we need in that specific moment. It is also looking in the past, watching the trend and trying to predict the future. What problems and what needs will be present in the future.

      BRIT contains data from previous years. As you’ve seen with biowaste, the data was from 2015-2021. Nevertheless, remember that an increasing trend doesn’t mean that it’ll increase till infinity. It is important to take under consideration nowadays social, economic and environmental aspects to predict, manage and solve the problem.