Looking around our community, using a just a pinch of sight and creativity, it’s quite easy to uncover inefficencies and gaps in our socialeconomic development model that can, easily, be converted into opportunities aimed at delivering economic and environmental potential through all the community.

When we’re looking around for those inefficiencies in a rural área, it’s quite normal to zoom in on problems concerning agricultural waste, forestry and biomass. Vila Boa do Bispo, in the North of Portugal, is no exception! A village bathed by the Tamega river on its sloap and right at the heart of the Vinho Verde wine region where vineyards, hills, blueberries, kiwis and forests define the landscape.

Taking the challenge of snooping around our community and reflecting on its potential and its resources, one of the gaps that has been most present throughout our local public body service is the difficulty of using and converting into economic capital, the green leftovers of agricultural activities such as branches, tree and plants pruning and remnants of agricultural transformation.

As we are witnessing a complete transformation of the economic development model, we are being presented with new concepts and possibilities that allow us to take advantage of new processes, techonogies and value chains. One of these possibilities is the chance of harvesting this natural potential and turn into economic and environmantal value.

This is one of the the gaps that the DESUWOW project tackles. The Vila Boa do Bispo municipality is working within the Consortium to help bridge this gap, contributing to finding ways to apply the proposed solutions by the project directly in the community. It sounds quite round and nuclear, but the path is quite obvious to us: we need to be able to design the correct workshop and activities’ models in order to get agriculture professionals, forestry professionals, specialists, NGOs food services and restaurants at the same table in order to create and implement the processes to collect agricultural activity’s waste and insert into added value activities alongside other value chains such as food, energy and back to agriculture.

We are working on materializing solutions for vineyards, fruit plants, forests and restaurants’ organic leftovers to become economically interesting againd through training and empowerment of these professionals.

Join us in this quest, get in touch with us and share the tools, methods, ideas and resources that we unfold along the way in order to make your own community or organisation greener and more circular.