ICHAR Italian Biochar Association

On 26 March 2009 the Italian Association on Biochar (ICHAR) was founded. ICHAR is a registered non-profit association supporting Italian researchers, commercial entities, development agents, farmers, and others committed to supporting sustainable biochar utilization systems that remove carbon from the atmosphere and enhance the earth’s soils. The Association was founded by representatives from National Research Council CNR-Ibimet Institute of Biometeorology of Florence and University of Udine (Department of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences), commercial ventures with a general interest in promoting the research, development, demonstration, use and commercialisation of the potential technology of biochar production in Italy.

ICHAR will acknowledge all inputs and will consider carefully confidentiality or non-disclosure requests associated to those inputs.

January 2011 Update

News from the Seventh Framework Research Programme of the European Commission: The EuroChar Project was launched in Firenze, Italy in January 2011 which was coordinated by the Italian National Research Council (CNR) under the framework of the FoxLab Initiative established together with the Edmund Mach Foundation (San Michele all'Adige, Trento). The project will operate over the next three years, and will investigate carbon sequestration potentials that can be achieved by transforming plant biomass into biochar. Biochar production will be demonstrated using commercially viable thermo-chemical (TC, Advanced Gasification Technologies, Cremona, Italy) or hydrothermal carbonization processes (HTC, CarbonSolutions, Germany) while detailed ISO-accredited whole Life Cycle Assessments will be carried out according to the International Reference Life Cycle Data System (ILCD, Imperial College, London, United Kingdom). Physico-chemical properties of biochar will be analyzed in a series of laboratory studies that will use standardized analytical protocols (Universitè Pierre et Marie Curie,  Paris, France and Martin Luther University, Wittenberg Halle, Germany) and a specific phyto-toxicity test will be made using molecular approaches involving a model plant (University of Southampton, United Kingdom). Part of the study will address the short versus long-term stability of Biochar using recently produced and aged charcoal samples coming from archaeological sites. Specific investigations will also be made to assess biochar decomposition using CO2-efflux measurements from 13C labeled materials (Università di Udine, Italy). Three large-scale field experiments will finally be made on short-term rotation forestry in Italy (Libera Università di Bolzano), France (Universitè Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris) and UK (University of Southampton) to analyze “realistic scale” application of biochar. A number of stakeholders will be involved to review the project’s activities under the framework of the EuroChar Stakeholder Committee (ESC) that will be created to meet periodically during annual project meetings. Dissemination activities will be implemented to make the project’s results available to a wider audience and the media.

Contact:

ICHAR –Florence CNR-Ibimet, National Research Council- Institute of Biometeorology

• Silvia Baronti-Secretariat
• Franco Miglietta-Coordinator

ICHAR- Udine University of Udine- Department of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences

• Alessandro Peresotti