Environmentally friendly new biodegradable plant-based polymer resin to coat nitrogen fertiliser for a controlled extended nutrients release.

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Agriculture applications are responsible for 3% of the energy consumed worldwide, 2% of these are used to produce inorganic fertilisers such as Urea. Due to the high solubility of these fertilisers in water, unfortunately, 70% of these fertilisers are leached fast from the soil in a few days and lost as pollution in the air and underground water leaving crops with only 20% of nutrients. Several products in the market were used to decrease the fertiliser fast leaching using a slow release chemical mechanism and by coating the fertiliser grains with water-resistant polymer and waxes. Currently, the coated fertilisers in the market were produced using a fossil-based expensive polymer which results in the expensive price of the final product (4-5 times the price of Urea), this limited the massive use of these coated fertilisers as well as concert about the effect of the use non-biodegradable polymer that was found to be toxic and accumulates in soils. In Biotica Ltd we invented a plant base polymer resin to coat fertilisers that is cost-effective and biodegradable and can extend the lifetime of fertilisers in soli for 6 months. This will decrease the final cost for farmers, decrease the pollution resulting from leaching and decrease the consumed energy for fertiliser production with less CO2 emission.