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An overview of technologies to recover phosphorus as struvite from wastewater: advantages and shortcomings

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Abstract

Phosphorus (P) is a significant limiting nutrient which is essential for all forms of lives. However, phosphate rock reserves are depleting rapidly due to population growth. At the same time, several countries have imposed legislative regulations on P-release into surface waters due to eutrophication. Nutrient recovery from wastewater can facilitate a sustainable, cost-effective and environment-friendly source of phosphorus. Although P-recovery as struvite from wastewater has been widely studied for a long time, there still exists a lot of challenges for widespread full-scale implementation. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the current state of the technologies for phosphorus recovery in the form of struvite. Fluidized bed reactors (FBRs) are widely used compared to continuously stirred reactors for P-recovery as struvite because of different solid and liquid retention time. Commercially available technologies were reported to accomplish about 80% P-removal efficiencies with a reasonable P-recovery for the most of the cases. The struvite production rate of various technologies varies from 0.89 to 13.7 kg/kg influent P. Nevertheless, these technologies are associated with several shortcomings such as high operational costs, high energy consumption, and large footprint. Increasing efforts focusing on the development of sustainable and commercially feasible technologies are expected in this sector as P-recovery is considered to be the future of wastewater engineering.

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  1. Department of Civil Engineering, The University of British Columbia, 2002-6250 Applied Science Lane, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada

    Shayok Ghosh, Sergey Lobanov & Victor K. Lo

  2. Department of Civil Engineering, East West University, Dhaka, 1000, Bangladesh

    Shayok Ghosh

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Appendix. Terminologies

Appendix. Terminologies

Footprint: The volume of the reactors required for different technologies.

Damage Unit: Egle et al. (2016) estimated “Damage Unit” using Eq. 1.

$$ {C}_{DU_P}=\frac{\sum_{i=1}^n\frac{C_i}{C_i^{\mathrm{reference}}}}{C_p} $$
(1)

where \( {C}_{DU_P} \) = damage unit concentration with respect to P content, Ci = concentration of a heavy metal in the product, Cireference = concentration of a heavy metal in the compost class A+ as a reference material, and CP = concentration of phosphorus in the product.

Reference system: Egle et al. (2016) defines a reference WWTP for the comparison of the performance of various technologies. A WWTP with a load of 100,000 of population equivalents which is equivalent to 65,700 kg P/year, P-removal by iron dosing or biological P-removal and sludge management processes which include thickening, anaerobic digestion, dewatering with the help of polymers, and co-incineration of sludge has been defined as a reference system. A detail description of this reference WWTP has been delineated in Egle et al. (2016).

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Ghosh, S., Lobanov, S. & Lo, V.K. An overview of technologies to recover phosphorus as struvite from wastewater: advantages and shortcomings. Environ Sci Pollut Res 26, 19063–19077 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-019-05378-6

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