Can quarantine plant-parasitic nematodes within wastes be managed by useful tools in a circular economy approach?

Seen as an integral part of sustainable development, circular economy represents a model of production and consumption notably based on the limitation of both resource wastage and environmental impact. Laboratories and commercial companies working on plant pathogens, in particular quarantine species, must effectively disinfect their waste to avoid disseminating these organisms. The methods used for waste disinfection can however incur high energy costs or pose environmental and human health hazards. Here, we tested the effectiveness of five disinfection methods — chlorination, heat treatment, composting, mesophilic methanation and waste stabilization ponds — on plant-parasitic nematodes belonging to the genera Globodera and Meloidogyne. For the widely used chlorination and heat treatment methods, we showed that they can be very effective in inactivating nematodes at relatively low chlorine doses and temperatures (60 °C–3 min and 50 °C–30 min), respectively. For the three other disinfection methods tested, initially designed for waste recycling, we obtained different levels of efficiency. Composting and mesophilic methanation (based on cattle or pig slurry) both led to the complete elimination of nematodes, even for short treatment durations. However, waste stabilization ponds showed contrasting results, ranging from virtually no effect to high levels of inactivation of nematodes. Our study demonstrates that it is possible to use more environmentally friendly disinfection methods to control plant-parasitic nematodes. In particular, this finding paves the way towards the treatment of infected plant materials using composting or methanation, providing that disinfection is still reached under other (real-life) treatment conditions, especially with other kinds of waste. Both composting and methanation recycle and thus valorize infected waste; they are viable alternatives to landfilling or incineration, thereby demonstrating the usefulness of a circular economy approach.