Do you work in agriculture, water, energy, transport, or another bio-based sector?
Join NPower’s Regional Action Groups: collaborative spaces for circular nutrient solutions.
Select your region to get involved
Join NPower’s Regional Action Groups: collaborative spaces for circular nutrient solutions.
Select your region to get involved
6/18/2025
We deep dive into the NPower Project through the words of Miguel Ángel Suárez, project coordinator at CETENMA. Across four episodes, we explore the significance of NPower for the Region of Murcia, its integrated vision for nutrient management, the innovative technologies it employs, and its approach to regional collaboration at the European level. Each post highlights a key episode from this interview, offering a deeper insight into NPower’s goals and impact.
This episode highlights NPower’s holistic approach, recognizing that environmental challenges are often intertwined with economic realities. Agriculture plays a vital role in Murcia’s regional economy, known as “the vegetable garden of Europe,” supplying produce to much of the continent. Therefore, a crucial aspect of NPower is to find a “compromise solution between the environment and the regional economy”. Suárez emphasizes the project’s ambition to bring together diverse economic and social sectors to discuss, understand each other’s challenges, and jointly develop solutions. This integrated vision relies on three key pillars:
Technology: Essential for mitigating impact and, crucially, for recovering nutrients. As Suárez points out, “the technological component is extremely important because, ultimately, it is necessary to consume fertilisers to produce, but if at the same time there is a flow of nutrients going into the environment, it is very important from the perspective not only of the environment but also of the circular economy to recover those nutrients so that they can be used in the local economy”.
Best Management Practices: Simple, existing measures can have a positive impact by reducing emissions and minimising environmental impact.
Governance: “Governance is fundamental,” Suárez pointed out, “because without measures, without laws, without forms of organisation, no matter how good the good practices or technologies are, it will be difficult for them to be implemented”. Governance provides the necessary organisation to put good ideas into practice.
