Maja Karolina Rydgård

Maja Karolina Rydgård is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, Section for Plant and Soil Sciences, within the Faculty of Science at the University of Copenhagen. Her research assesses environmental impacts of nutrient recycling technologies to optimize societal utilization of waste streams and their embedded nutrients/energy.

Education:

• PhD in Environmental Engineering, Lund University (2015–2020, awarded 30 June 2020)

Research Interests: Specializing in Life Cycle Assessment and environmental modeling, she investigates nutrient recycling systems, waste management, and sustainable agricultural practices. Her work quantifies emissions from recycled fertilizers using advanced modeling tools to support circular economy transitions in food systems.

Publication Trends: Recent outputs (2024–2025) demonstrate consistent focus on life cycle assessments of nutrient recovery pathways—including sewage sludge pyrolysis, cover crop co-digestion, and regional phosphorus modeling. These studies address technical and systemic barriers to bio-based fertilizer adoption while advancing methodologies for spatially explicit environmental impact evaluation.

Grants: Core contributor to the FertiCycle project, funded by the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie actions.