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The report details the results of the BONUS RETURN project, which identified and evaluated ecotechnologies for recovering nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon from wastewater and agriculture in the Baltic Sea Region. While agricultural waste recovery often showed positive net present value, wastewater technologies typically required expensive infrastructure, leading to negative net present values. The project emphasizes that transitioning to a circular nutrient economy requires shifting away from linear 'silo' thinking, harmonizing EU regulations for phosphorus, and adjusting fertilizer pricing to account for environmental externalities.

The BONUS RETURN decision-support toolbox offers 16 tools to help decision-makers transition to a circular economy by adopting eco-technologies for nutrient and carbon recovery. It covers the entire innovation lifecycle, from identifying criteria through social innovation and multi-criteria analysis to promoting existing technologies via sustainable and circular public procurement. The guide also details methods for supporting pre-commercial innovation, such as innovation competitions, market surveys, independent comparative analyses, and testbed trials. It concludes by framing these tools within a Technological Innovation Systems (TIS) approach to create long-term strategic incentives and co-benefits for the Baltic Sea Region.

The BONUS RETURN project has released three baseline SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool) model applications for the Vantaanjoki (Finland), Fyrisån (Sweden), and Słupia (Poland) river basins. These models, which have undergone calibration and validation, are hosted in the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE) open data repository to allow researchers and practitioners to utilize existing parameterizations or develop new scenarios for these and similar target areas.

The report evaluates the economic viability of various eco-technologies in the Fyrisån (Sweden), Słupia (Poland), and Vantaanjoki (Finland) river basins using a combined Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) and Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA) approach. It finds that most technologies currently yield a negative net present value (NPV) due to high investment costs, with the notable exceptions of anaerobic digestion and thermal treatment in the Vantaanjoki basin.

The report evaluates different systems for nutrient and carbon recovery in the Vantaanjoki (Finland), Fyrisån (Sweden), and Słupia (Poland) catchment areas. Using a multi-criteria analysis (MCA) involving stakeholder weighting, the study compares baseline management against alternatives such as anaerobic digestion, pyrolysis, and source-separation. In Vantaanjoki, anaerobic digestion scored highest. In Fyrisån, source-separation was the most sustainable. In Słupia, nutrient extraction performed best, while source-separation was found to be potentially less sustainable than the baseline due to local context and low adoption rates.

The report examines the transition from linear to circular resource use in wastewater management, focusing on the socio-cultural barriers to recycling sewage sludge as fertilizer. It analyzes historical practices in the EU and provides detailed case studies from three river basins in Sweden, Poland, and Finland, highlighting how perceptions of risk and regulatory gaps hinder the adoption of eco-technologies.