The paper and presentation will focus on the farmers’ attitudes to RDF sources. Sources of RDF waste by-products include animal manure, sewage sludge from the treatment of wastewater, household waste, food-industry waste and urban green waste. As CERI is an Irish conference, it was interesting to determine the Irish survey participants’ opinion on different sources of RDFs compared to those from the other NW Europe countries. Therefore, the survey results from Ireland were directly compared to the combined results collected from participants in NW Europe.
To assess the farmers’ attitudes to different sources of RDFs the survey questions that covered the willingness to accept RDFs from different sources and why or under which conditions would they consider or not consider using products from these sources were included in the paper. The RDF products that participants had heard of the most and the types of RDFs the participants currently use or have used in the past were also included. We know from the farmers’ survey analysis that participants in Ireland are more willing to accept RDFs from different sources compared to those in NW Europe. In particular, their willingness to utilise RDFs from animal waste, food industry waste and urban green waste sources is on par with the other NW Europe countries. Though participants in Ireland have heard of RDF products, such as compost and sewage sludge, it is also evident that some of those in Ireland have not heard of other RDF products as much as their NW Europe counterparts. These results are discussed in the paper and will be further debated at the conference in August.