Nutrient Recovery From Waste
About
Technologies that recover nutrients from wastewater (where it is a nuisance) to produce fertilizer for agriculture (where it is a resource) represent an untapped opportunity to simultaneously re-balance the N cycle, reduce GHG emissions, and save costs for wastewater agencies and their customers. Producing a marketable product from human waste provides an incentive for public agencies and social enterprises to collect and properly treat waste, addressing the urgent need to provide safely managed sanitation for over three billion people currently lacking access to this basic human right while increasing food security. Our group works both on technologies to recover nutrients from different waste streams, as well as systems analyses to evaluate the economic and environmental implications of integrating these technologies into different contexts. Currently, we are developing sorption-based approaches (ion exchange resins and biochar) to produce fertilizer from urine (where the nutrients are concentrated). Previous work has demonstrated the feasibility of this approach in San Francisco, CA and Nairobi, Kenya (research partnership with Sanergy). We have also evaluated the potential to recover nutrients from the digestate of anaerobic digesters designed to produce bioenergy from organic waste streams.
Selected Publications
Orner, K.D., S. Smith, S. Nordahl, A. Chakrabarti, H. Breunig, C.D. Scown, H. Leverenz, K.L. Nelson, A. Horvath. (2022). “Environmental and Economic Impacts of Managing Nutrients in Digestate Derived from Sewage Sludge and High-Strength Organic Waste.” Environmental Science & Technology. 56(23):17256-17265. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.2c04020
Orner, K.D., E. Deleu, K. Rabaey, and K.L. Nelson. (2022) “Accelerating Urea Hydrolysis in Fresh Urine by Modifying Operating Conditions of a Sequencing Batch Reactor.” Environmental Technology. https://doi.org/10.1080/09593330.2022.2129456.
Orner, K.D., S.J. Smith, H.M. Breunig, C.D. Scown, and K.L. Nelson. (2021) “Fertilizer Demand and Potential Supply through Nutrient Recovery from Organic Waste Digestate in California.” Water Research 206: 117717. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2021.117717.
Tarpeh, W.A., I. Wald, M.O. Omollo, T. Egan, and K.L. Nelson. (2018) “Evaluating Ion Exchange for Nitrogen Recovery from Source-Separated Urine in Nairobi, Kenya.” Development Engineering 3:188–95. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.deveng.2018.07.002.
Tarpeh, W.A., I. Wald, M. Wiprächtiger, and K.L. Nelson. (2018). “Effects of operating and design parameters on ion exchange columns for nutrient recovery from urine.” Environmental Science: Water Research & Technology. 4(6):828-838. doi.org/10.1039/C7EW00478H.
Tarpeh, W.A., J.M. Barazesh, T.Y. Cath, and K.L. Nelson. (2018) “Electrochemical Stripping to Recover Nitrogen from Source-Separated Urine.” Environmental Science & Technology. 52(3):1453-1460. doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.7b05488.
Kavvada, O., W.A. Tarpeh, A. Horvath, and K.L. Nelson. (2017) “Life-Cycle Cost and Environmental Assessment of Decentralized Nitrogen Recovery Using Ion Exchange from Source-Separated Urine through Spatial Modeling.” Environmental Science & Technology 51(21): 12061–71. doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.7b02244.
Tarpeh, W.A., K.M. Udert, K.L. Nelson. (2017) “Comparing ion exchange resins for nitrogen recovery from source-separated urine.” Environmental Science and Technology. 51(4):2373–2381. doi: 10.1021/acs.est.6b05816.