This pilot focuses on soil health assessment and sustainable land use by integrating agricultural, industrial, and regulatory datasets. The GDDS facilitates soil contamination tracking, nutrient recycling optimization, and regulatory compliance, enabling data-driven sustainable agriculture and environmental protection.
The SAGE (Sustainable Green Europe Data Space) project targets the four strategic pillars in the European Green Deal— Zero Pollution, Climate Adaptation, Biodiversity, and the Circular Economy Action Plan, by implementing a rich portfolio of use cases in each of them.
The project demonstrates a total of 10 pilot use cases to foster data-driven sustainability solutions across biodiversity, climate, circular economy, and pollution monitoring. Below you can read about one of these pilots.
The overview of all use cases can be found here: Use-cases
Use case objective
The objective of the SCDS (Soil Circularity Dataspace) is to promote circular use of soil resources. Smarter practices are needed to deal with increasingly scarce resources and raw materials. Projects in infrastructure, land development and nature conservation require lots of sand and/or clay. The quantities of available soil, however, continue to decrease. Excavation works that release soil offer opportunities to tackle these bottlenecks. Such secondary soil is currently recycled only to a limited extent. Towards the future, it is inevitable that soil fluxes become more circular.
In the EU vision on soil, soil ecosystems in the EU are resilient and in healthy condition by 2050. Protection, sustainable use and restoration of soil needs to become the norm.
In the EU Circular Economy Action Plan, the EU is promoting initiatives to reduce soil sealing, rehabilitate abandoned or contaminated brownfields and increase the safe, sustainable and circular use of excavated soils.
End users
Since soil is such a versatile and widely needed resource, the potential stakeholders within this use case are broad, with actors from the public and private sectors. End users can be Local or regional governments, Municipality, Farmers, Construction companies etc. These parties can benefit from a reliable dataspace (SCDS) on secondary soil resources. The SCDS enables these end users to more effectively manage their soil resources and explore opportunities for exchange.
Objectives/Benefits
The implementation of the Soil Circularity Data Space (SCDS) aims to deliver benefits to both public and private stakeholders by enabling a circular approach to soil management. Contractors can benefit from the SCDS to make their operations more cost and time efficient, while public organisations like municipalities and provinces can achieve positive environmental and societal impacts. Contractors can benefit from real-time access to soil availability through digital marketplaces for buying and also selling excess soil, match soil sources and destinations to reduce transport distances, and digital tools and automated data flows to reduce the administrative and manual burden associated with soil sourcing, handling, and compliance.
Public organisations can benefit through environmental and climate change mitigation, by minimizing the extraction of primary soil, promoting reuse of secondary soil, integrating biological indicators, and improving transparency around soil contamination risks. They can improve public services and community benefits, better manage spatial planning, green urban development, and timely delivery of housing projects, facilitate international soil exchange, soil passports and sharing of soil information across European countries.
Tech provider
Sogelink is a pan-European IT company with a focus on construction and the built environment. From Sogelink, the Innovation-department participates a SAGE. Sogelink has a platform running to manage data on supply and demand of soil.
Sogelink takes the role of technical lead in the Soil Circularity use case with a focus on the following activities:
- App development
- Technical support for end users
- Integration of UC specific datasets with the dataspace components
- User interfaces
- Digital Twin
- Soil registration platform
Geonovum is the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) executive committee in the Netherlands. Their key task is coordinating the adoption and implementation of standards that ensure the functioning of the national spatial data infrastructure. Geonovum will provide and fulfil the following roles and support the following activities in the GDDS and use case Circular Soils: Interoperability architect, Governance support, User support and Training.
Participants – end users
There is an active collaboration with several end users in the Netherlands. This includes provinces, municipalities and contractors, and more end users are to be included from different countries.
Expected results
There is a recognized need for the establishment of EU-wide policies governing soil passports (see EU soil strategy for 2030). These passports serve as vital tools for monitoring the movement of soil across various geographical locations. They contain critical data concerning the soil’s origin, composition, and intended utilization, thereby promoting transparent and traceable soil management practices. As part of the soil passport, the implementation of certification systems is a crucial step in verifying the quality and provenance of transported soil materials. Furthermore, policies should be developed to further incentivize contractors to adopt circular practices.
Contact
Brian de Vogel, Sogelink – brian.de.vogel@sogelink.nl
