For years, Natural Resource Management (NRM) organisations have worked to improve water quality at the end of the chain. This project shows the next step in that journey, connecting water quality with economic change by not only identifying opportunities to recover value upstream, but also helping coordinate the conditions needed for those opportunities to become real.
Excess nutrients aren’t just an environmental issue, they reveal a system design problem. When nutrients leak downstream, value is leaking upstream.
The first step of our project was shifting the mindset, helping people see that water quality and lost value are connected, not separate issues. Through the Circular Opportunities for the Proserpine System project, Reef Catchment and our delivery partner Rocio Rutter from Bivio Consulting have been mapping nutrient flows (like nitrogen, pastiches) across aquaculture and sugarcane supply chains, identifying where value and nutrients are lost, and working with industry and government to unlock practical circular pathways that recover value upstream before it becomes pollution downstream.
We turned the insights from the material flow analysis as intervention hot spots, revealing that aquafeed ingredients and pond metabolic waste for aquaculture, and fertiliser inputs and mill outflows for sugarcane where areas of circular opportunity.
Todd McNeill, Reef Catchments Manager for Sustainable Agriculture, says: “Turning local industries into circular solutions for bigger, lasting regional impact is crucial to make our region economically and environmentally sustainable and connected.”
Our most recent workshop brought together diverse stakeholders from industry, government and research to explore where value and nutrients are lost, build a shared understanding of the system barriers holding initiatives back, strengthen coordination across stakeholders, uncover co-benefits, and identify practical steps to strengthen supply chains, cut costs, and improve the environment together.
Delivery partner Rocio Rutter shared: “The sugarcane industry faces challenges from volatile input prices, mills are under throughput pressure, stricter environmental rules, stranded energy, costly waste, and ongoing nutrient runoff. The Mackay Whitsunday Isaac region is full of circular ideas – but progress is held back by fragmentation and system-level barriers.”
Progress is held back by a combination of system-level challenges which are:
- Capital access – Funding supports initial concepts and pilots, but not the scale-up and coordination needed for real impact.
- Market and offtake – Uncertain demand for circular products, no access to staged off-take, and many operations are not ready to integrate them.
- Risk and value flow – Hesitation due to unclear returns, shared risks, or misaligned incentives.
- Input feedstock – Variability in the supply of materials, and no shared infrastructure to collect and pre-process them for circular use.
- Infrastructure and logistics – Fragmented systems, limited transport options, and gaps in coordination.
Through this project, Reef Catchments seeks to support the Mackay Whitsunday Isaac region to reduce nutrient runoff, save money, create new opportunities (or support the scale of existing ones), and help our region grow. By looking at the whole system, we’re helping farms, industry and the environment thrive.
With global shocks already affecting fertiliser supply and farm costs, building domestic circular alternatives from local resources is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a resilience priority we must work on together.