In 2009, the Stockholm Resilience Centre issued the idea of defining planetary boundaries as a concept of nine essential tipping points of the Earth system. By exceeding the boundaries it is suggested that irreversible and abrupt environmental change will occur. One of the boundaries refers to biochemical flows and is directly related to phosphorous. Phosphorus, or more concrete phosphate, is essential for all kind of fertilizers. Unfortunately, phosphate minerals in nature are limited and corresponding resources are only available in certain countries. 80% of the world resources are located in Morocco. This is one of the reasons that phosphate minerals were included into the list of critical resources, issued in its latest version by the European Union in 2014. Critical resources are those resources that are limited, non-substitutable, and connected to a risk in security of supply.<br/>Every human being excretes about 2 g phosphate every day. The phosphate goes to the wastewater and regularly into the environment. New developments in applied environmental technology to recover the phosphate from wastewater are under development and piloting. In Germany, environmental policy suggests to toughen up wastewater treatment to recover most of the phosphate from wastewater and sludge with the aim to reuse it as fertilizers of high quality. All the processes are based in essential elements of chemistry, e.g. the chemistry of phosphates and acid base chemistry.<br/>In 2016, a project was launched with the aim to create learning environments to deal with the societally, economically and environmentally relevant context of phosphate recovery in chemistry education. Based on new experiments, the project established practical learning environments in two German universities as places for non-formal learning about phosphate recovery. Corresponding lessons are offered to secondary school chemistry classes and groups of technical trainees in chemistry related professions. The practical learning is embedded in a digital learning environment. Experiences from its use in German high school and also in US undergraduate education are reported.<br/>

Phosphate recovery – applied environmental technology as a relevant issue in the learning of chemistry

256th National Meeting (2018)

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