Organic Waste Recycling and Circular Nutrient Management for Sustainable and Resilient Agroecosystems

Globally, industrialized agricultural systems across regions of the world are highly productive, but their dominant intensive production structures have contributed to major environmental challenges, including nutrient losses, soil degradation, greenhouse gas emissions, and declining resource-use efficiency. Many regions generate large volumes of organic materials and by-products—including livestock manure, crop residues, agro-industrial by-products, and food processing and postharvest waste streams, whose volumes are further amplified by losses across food supply chains—that can be reused or transformed for agricultural benefit. These organic residuals differ from the materials produced after treatment (such as digestates, composts, or biochar), and distinguishing between the two helps to improve understanding of circular resource flows. Currently, many of these materials remain underused or are managed inefficiently.In the context of climate variability, input price volatility, and increasing pressure to reduce pollution, there is growing interest in circular approaches that recover nutrients, stabilize organic matter, and return waste-derived products to agroecosystems. Advances in composting, anaerobic digestion, biochar production, residue processing, and precision nutrient management offer new opportunities to connect waste management with soil health, crop productivity, and environmental protection in diverse agricultural systems worldwide.Despite growing interest in circular agriculture, major knowledge gaps remain regarding the effective management and beneficial reuse of organic waste in intensive agroecosystems. Existing research is often fragmented across manure management, crop residue handling, nutrient recovery, soil amendment studies, greenhouse gas mitigation, and water quality assessment, with limited integration across system scales and time horizons. As a result, it remains difficult to determine which waste management strategies provide the best balance between agronomic performance, environmental protection, economic feasibility, and resilience under different agricultural contexts.This Research Topic aims to fill that gap by bringing together interdisciplinary studies on the generation, treatment, transformation, and reuse of organic waste in such agricultural systems for development of evidence-based practices. The collection will focus on how waste-derived materials and circular nutrient management practices can reduce nutrient losses, improve soil–plant functioning, support remediation of degraded soils, lower emissions, and strengthen resilience to climate stress. It will also examine how technological, regulatory, and management innovations can improve the safe and sustainable integration of organic waste into agroecosystems. By centering waste management within broader sustainability transitions, this collection will provide evidence to support more resource-efficient and climate-resilient agricultural systems.________________________________________This Research Topic welcomes contributions that examine the sustainable management, treatment, reuse, and environmental implications of organic waste and by-products in varied and similar agroecosystems practices. The collection is particularly interested in studies that connect waste management practices with agronomic, environmental, and circular economy outcomes.• Technologies and processes for recycling and transforming agricultural organic waste (e.g. composting, anaerobic digestion, pyrolysis, and emerging bioprocesses)• Agronomic performance and environmental effects of applying organic residues and processed products (manure, crop residues, composts, digestates, biochar, biosolids, and food processing by-products) as nutrient sources or soil amendments• Influence of organic waste use on soil–plant systems, including soil fertility, soil carbon, nutrient cycling, and productivity• Environmental implications of organic waste use, including greenhouse gas emissions, nutrient leaching, water quality, and food safety and quality considerations in the reuse of food-derived and agro-industrial organic materials• Use of waste-derived products for remediation and restoration of degraded or contaminated agricultural soils• Life-cycle assessment, systems analysis, and techno-economic evaluation of circular nutrient management strategies• Policy, governance, and regulatory frameworks that support sustainable recycling of agricultural organic waste and nutrient recovery• Farm-scale and regional approaches for closing nutrient and carbon loops in agroecosystems Topic editors: Eric Siqueiros, Partson Mubvumba, Pankaj B Pathare Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/82308/organic-waste-recycling-and-circular-nutrient-management-for-sustainable-and-resilient-agroecosystems