Water contamination is ubiquitous and persists across our water resources and supply. Much attention is given to newly identified and emerging contaminants, but we also struggle to successfully mitigate “old”, or well-known, contaminants, which have included ammonia, nitrate, and, more recently, phosphate in municipal wastewaters. However, these compounds are also critical nutrients used to support the global industrialized agriculture sector. Phosphate is of particular importance and concern because phosphate-based fertilizers are currently produced through the mining of phosphate rock, a limited resource mineral. The world’s known available supply of phosphate rock is predicted to become limited within the range of 30 – 200 years, and the flow of phosphorus through the agricultural food cycle is unidirectional, with large portions of mined phosphorus ending up in the environment and landfill. Ammonia is produced for fertilizer and other chemical uses via the Haber-Bosch process, which, annually, uses 2% of global fossil fuel energy demand and contributes 450 M metric tons of CO<sub>2</sub> to global emissions. Meanwhile, the technical treatment train for municipal wastewater treatment facilities targets removal of ammonia and phosphate as contaminants, enabling this one-way flow of nutrients from mineral sources and energy-intensive processes through food to waste. This scenario is no longer tenable as we face limited phosphorus world-wide, as well as energy and food security challenges.<br/>In this talk, I will discuss our current research focused on ammonium and phosphate recovery from wastewaters through electrochemistry within the overall idea of changing municipal wastewater treatment from primarily contaminant removal to include resource recovery. This project includes an interdisciplinary team of 6 research groups across electrochemistry, electrochemical engineering, agronomy, agricultural economics, life cycle analysis, and protein engineering. My talk will discuss our interdisciplinary approach to phosphate and ammonia recycling from wastewater and will include recent results on electrochemical recovery of struvite (magnesium ammonium phosphate), design and scale up of struvite production, and soil and row crop studies on recycled versus commercial fertilizer products.

Electrochemical ammonium and phosphate recovery from wastewater

ACS Fall 2021

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.