Each year, the Delmarva Peninsula produces approximately 1000 chickens for every person living in the 5400 square miles between the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays.  Due to increasingly strict regulations in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, innovative resource recovery systems are needed to handle the large volume of nutrient-rich poultry litter.  To address this issue, we have developed a technology that uses CO<sub>2</sub> gas and strong acid to mobilize phosphate, ammonium, magnesium, potassium, calcium, and other species in poultry litter.  The nutrient-rich liquid is then separated from the nutrient-deficient poultry litter solids.  Next, the pH of the nutrient-rich solution is adjusted through aeration and NaOH addition to generate struvite-based particles.  At the bench-scale, this process has demonstrated &gt;80% phosphorus recovery from real poultry litters collected from Chesapeake Bay farms.  In this work, the technology has been scaled up to a 100-L reactor with a Matlab-based supervisory control and data acquisition system that provides full automation of the nutrient recovery process.  The system was also configured to allow recycle of the process effluent, thereby increasing the inherent sustainability of the resource recovery process by reducing wastewater production.  Using this 100-L system, we investigated the extraction, precipitation, and overall recovery of phosphorus and ammonium from poultry litter in single pass and recycle experiments.  The settling behavior, morphology, chemical composition, and growth of struvite particles were examined to ensure the applicability of this system for recovery of a high-quality product.  Furthermore, the co-recovery of organic contaminants, such as estrogenic hormones and animal-labelled antibiotics, was studied in select experiments to confirm the suitability of the recovered product for subsequent use as a fertilizer outside of the Chesapeake Bay.  The findings from this study will help to not only reduce nutrient loads in the Chesapeake Bay, but also identify alternative sources for critical nutrients like phosphorus.  <br/>

Application of physical/chemical treatment processes to agricultural waste: Recovering nutrient-laden particles from poultry litter

255th National Meeting (2018)

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