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Winner 'NitroCapt' creates green fertiliser using plasma, air & renewable energy
Local production boosts resilience, reduces emissions and energy use significantly
Prize will fund commercial scaling of Swedish green fertiliser pilot plant
Global finalists included waste, climate stress & pesticide-free farming innovations
A low emission ‘green fertiliser’ technology made with air and plasma, was awarded the Food Planet Prize 2025 for its potential to disrupt the global nitrogen fertiliser industry.
Developed by a start-up called NitroCapt, short for ‘nitrogen capture’, the technology claims to produce nitrogen fertiliser in a sustainable way by avoiding fossil fuels and instead oxidising the nitrogen in the air with plasma to break apart nitrogen molecules, with green electricity as input.
NitroCapt founder Gustaf Forsberg, who received the $2 million Food Planet Prize on June 13, by Curt Bergfors Foundation at Stockholm in Sweden, told Down To Earth that this innovation aims to significantly reduce the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from the fertiliser industry, which is currently responsible for around 2.7 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions.
“Nitrogen fertilisers are used for 50 per cent of the world’s food production and emit as much carbon dioxide as the aviation industry. The current fossil-based process has reached its end point,” said Forsberg, a Swedish physicist.
The technology claims to reduce the use of energy tenfold and can be produced locally, thus creating self-sufficiency in fertilisers in many countries.
Reflecting on how agriculture and food security is affected by factors like conflicts and trade wars, Forsberg said, “When there is no nitrogen fertiliser available, which has been the case with Europe for a couple of periods as a consequence of the war in Ukraine, that becomes a huge uncertainty for the population. With this technology, we can provide a system with local self-sufficiency which is unsensitive to these kinds of geo political tensions, thus creating food security resilience and self-sufficiency in fertilisers that is extremely important.”
Currently, NitroCapt has a pilot plant in Uppsala, a city near Stockholm. The fertiliser is demonstrated on a farm on Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and on Forsberg’s own farm.
“We are going to scale the pilot by the end of next year and invest in preparing to put our plan in a commercial stage with the help of the award money. We will have a commercially operating unit that can produce it at a larger scale and start delivering fertiliser to farmers,” Forsberg told reporters.
For now, the plan is to scale it in Europe with farmer-owned cooperative organisation that can invest in small production units.
“In other geographies we might work with governments, NGOs, or private companies, depending on what the market structure is like,” he said.
The Curt Bergfors Food Planet Prize, known as the largest environmental award, was established in Sweden in 2019 and supports initiatives that “significantly reduce the environmental impact of the way we eat today.”
“Unlike many awards, the Food Planet Prize recognises initiatives for their potential future impact on the environment rather than past achievements,” a statement by the foundation said.
The international jury consisted of 10 experts in food systems. The jury was co-chaired by Johan Rockström, who led the development of the Planetary Boundaries framework, and Magnus Nilsson, director-general of the Curt Bergfors Foundation.
The other five finalists included initiatives from across the world:
Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies (United States): They use fungal endophytes and microbes to help crops resist climate stress, cut fertiliser use and boost yields.
Astungkara Way (Indonesia): This method reinvents rice farming with regenerative methods to increase productivity and enhance farmer livelihoods in an ecologically beneficial way.
Pride on Our Plates (China): This tackles massive food waste in China’s catering sector by empowering small businesses with data-driven insights and behavioural strategies.
Semion (Argentina): The method fights pesticide resistance with plant-based defences that protect yields and reduce chemical harm.
Virtual Irrigation Academy (Australia): Equips smallholder farmers with smart soil sensors to save water and increase food production.