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Technologies and logistics for phosphorus recovery from livestock waste

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Abstract

Phosphorus (P) runoff from livestock waste can trigger algal blooms that adversely affect aquatic life and human health. One strategy to mitigate this problem is to install nutrient recovery technologies that concentrate and mobilize nutrients from nutrient-rich regions to nutrient-deficient ones. We present supply chain design formulations to identify optimal types and locations for P recovery technologies. The formulations capture trade-offs in transportation costs, technology efficiency, investment/operational costs, revenue collected from different recovered products (struvite and nutrient cakes), and environmental impact. Our computational framework is used to analyze the impact of different scenarios for market prices of recovered products, recovery yields, and remediation costs. We find that transportation of waste alone (without any processing) can achieve significant reductions in environmental impact at low cost, but cannot achieve economic sustainability in the long run due to the lack of direct revenue streams. Mechanical separation technologies that recover P in the form of nutrient cakes are low-cost solutions that can achieve high environmental benefits and reduced transportation costs, but revenues are also limited due to low values of the cakes. Struvite crystallization in fluidized beds is found to be a highly attractive option under current struvite prices, but economic sustainability is strongly dependent on yield recoveries (which are currently highly uncertain).

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge funding from the National Science Foundation (under Grant CBET-1604374) and MINECO (under Grant DPI2015-67341-C2-1-R).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1415 Engineering Dr, Madison, WI, 53706, USA

    Apoorva M. Sampat & Victor M. Zavala

  2. Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Salamanca, Plz. Caidos 1-5, 37008, Salamanca, Spain

    Edgar Martín-Hernández & Mariano Martín

Authors
  1. Apoorva M. Sampat
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  2. Edgar Martín-Hernández
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  3. Mariano Martín
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  4. Victor M. Zavala
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Correspondence to Victor M. Zavala.

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Sampat, A.M., Martín-Hernández, E., Martín, M. et al. Technologies and logistics for phosphorus recovery from livestock waste. Clean Techn Environ Policy 20, 1563–1579 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10098-018-1546-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10098-018-1546-y

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