Algae related regulation & legislation

This portal was done as an activity of the Locality project, a Horizon Europe project where 27 partners are doing some interesting and attractive work in algae, circularity and sustainability.

Project Locality is briefly titled Circularity Powered by Algae and focuses on algae value chains to reduce waste streams from industrial production. Innovative and sustainable solutions are being developed in 3 regional ecosystems in the North and the Baltic Sea. Almost all tasks in the Locality project touch the algae related regulation in some way, so we wanted to collect the information on algae related legislation at one place.

We write these pages with a model reader in our mind: somebody who cultivates algae and wants to comply with the rules.

We focus mainly on EU legislation. We will try to include member state legislation where we have sufficient information, but it remains incomplete and will hopefully be updated with additional contributors. We will sometimes mention differences with the US legislation where we have such information, but we are pretty ignorant on this topic. Even more, we are entirely ignorant of the issues of third-country (say, Asian) legislation. Further contributions are very welcome here.

As always, all relevant rules must be complied with as stated in the original form. We present a subjective compilation and comments on the rules. Still, we give no guarantee that our subjective view is complete, up-to-date, correct, error-free, or in compliance with any official interpretation or similar. We try hard to ensure that the information on this page is helpful to the algae community, but the responsibility for using and checking this information rests with the reader. In any serious situation, proper legal advice is essential.

Many of the Horizon projects include a Legislation and Regulation task for two reasons:

1. The funding body is usually interested in the regulatory feedback from the projects. The fact that an innovative solution developed in the project is slightly out of the existing regulatory frame indicates the solution is genuinely innovative. So a need to provide some regulatory feedback from projects is a good mark of something truly innovative is going on in the projects.
2. Real scientists (and also some technologists) are quite ignorant of the regulatory aspect of their work. A regulation/legislation task helps keep the work topics compliant where there is no need to jump outside the regulatory framework.

Similar tasks within different projects call for coordination, sharing of work and experience. This is the purpose of the initiative to form a legal cluster of the legislative and regulatory tasks of different Horizon projects. If we manage to organize such a cluster, we will also share the work and improve the quality of the work of this portal or some kind of its successor.

Algal technology is relatively new, there are only a few established practices, and correspondingly, it is poorly covered in specialized legislation. Some people claim we would need a dedicated legislation to cover this emerging activity. However, existing regulation also applies to algae, food regulation when algae are used for food, feed regulation when they are used for feed, environmental regulation when we use algae for bioremediation. So having a dedicated algal legislation would be like having a food safety legislation for apples and food safety legislation for beef - each of them would be a complex topic in itself and although each of them might be simpler than the universal food safety legislation, the overall complexity wold be higher, we would have additional issues of deciding when to apply each of them and similar. It seems the system as it is is structured well and, applies the rules universally. It just means we have to cope with a huge body of legislation where not all parts are applicable to all situations. Not much different for any other produce.

The advocates for a dedicated legislation aim at specifics of algal cultivation. What are they:

1. water organisms - we are not alone, all aquaculture uses water organisms,
2. use of CO2 - there are greenhouses that use elevated CO2 levels, we are planting trees as a means of CO2 abatement,
3. use of water soluble nutrients or use of wastewater - there is hydroponics doing the same, there are artificial wetlans used in water treatment,
4. algae are microorganisms - there are other microorganisms that we use daily, think of yeasts, all fermented food, wine, beer; microbiological safety applies in all cases with similar rules.