Agro-waste valorisation is emerging as a high-value strategy to reduce agricultural residues while replacing fossil-based plastics and synthetic agrochemicals. Converting crop residues into bioplastics and plant bio-stimulants aligns with circular economy goals by closing material loops and reducing waste. This article summarizes life cycle assessment (LCA) findings on these pathways, highlighting environmental benefits, key trade-offs, and design considerations for integrated biorefineries. Overall, agro-waste-derived products offer significant potential for lowering greenhouse gas emissions and resource use, though results depend strongly on system boundaries, energy supply, and allocation methods.

Synthetic microbial communities (SynComs)-deliberately designed consortia with defined composition and functional traits-are emerging as powerful tools for restoring soil health. By combining complementary microbial metabolisms, SynComs can accelerate contaminant degradation, enhance nutrient cycling, and improve plant performance more reliably than single-strain inoculants. This article summarises how SynComs function, highlights key indicators for assessing their efficiency, and evaluates their potential for sustainable soil remediation.

Abiotic stresses drought, heat, salinity, and extreme temperatures are primary constraints on staple-crop productivity under climate change. Conventional breeding and genetic modification have delivered important gains, but their pace and scope may not match accelerating climatic pressures. Epigenome engineering, which manipulates heritable and reversible chromatin states (DNA methylation, histone marks, and small-RNA pathways) at specific loci without changing underlying DNA sequence, offers a complementary route for improving stress tolerance and stress memory in crops. Targeted epigenetic tools (e.g., dCas9 fused to DNA-methyltransferases/ demethylases, histone acetyltransferases/ deacetylases, or transcriptional activators/repressors) permit locus-specific activation or repression of stress-responsive networks, and have already produced stress-resilience phenotypes in model plants and early crop studies. Epigenomic approaches can modulate hormone signaling, osmoprotectant pathways, and antioxidant systems, and in some cases generate mitotically and potentially meiotically heritable effects that constitute a form of rapid adaptation (epigenetic memory). Key challenges for translation include ensuring specificity and stability of edits, understanding transgenerational inheritance, regulatory acceptance, and delivery in diverse staple species. Realizing the potential of epigenome engineering will require integration of high-resolution epigenomic mapping, robust editing platforms, field validation, and breeding pipelines that combine epigenetic variants with conventional genetic improvements.