Wastewater contains valuable resources that can be recovered for beneficial uses, including recycled water, nutrients, and energy. The incentives to recover these resources are growing as human populations increasingly face water scarcity, food insecurity, eutrophication, and rising greenhouse gas emissions. For populations that still lack access to adequate sanitation infrastructure, innovative strategies that integrate resource recovery hold promise to accelerate investment in effective solutions. In this talk, I will discuss two approaches to recover wastewater resources in agriculture, which illustrate the food, energy, water (FEWs) nexus. The first FEWs approach is to irrigate crops with recycled water. The second FEWs approach is to de-link water and nutrient recovery by concentrating nutrients from high strength waste streams (e.g., urine, anaerobic digestate) to produce fertilizer.

PLENARY: A Global Perspective on Wastewater as an Agricultural Resource: Knowledge Gaps and Opportunities