Rapid urbanization and industrialization in the 19th century led to unhealthy environments and wide-spread epidemic diseases. In response, research was undertaken that led to the development of sanitation technology. Exactly 100 years since the activated sludge process was presented ( 1 ), it is still at the heart of current sewage treatment technology. Activated sludge is a mixture of inert solids from sewage combined with a microbial population growing on the biodegradable substrates present in the sewage. The settling and recycling of sludge inside treatment plants was the invention of Ardern and Lockett. The current demands from a rapidly growing human population and the need for a more sustainable society are pushing forward new developments for sewage handling. These developments have two main drivers: general process improvements and the contribution to the recycling of resources ( 2 , 3 ).

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/344/6191/1452.full.pdf

Anticipating the next century of wastewater treatment

Life cycle assessment applied to wastewater treatment: State of the art

Phosphorus (P) is a critical, geographically concentrated, nonrenewable resource necessary to support global food production. In excess (e.g., due to runoff or wastewater discharges), P is also a primary cause of eutrophication. To reconcile the simultaneous shortage and overabundance of P, lost P flows must be recovered and reused, alongside improvements in P-use efficiency. While this motivation is increasingly being recognized, little P recovery is practiced today, as recovered P generally cannot compete with the relatively low cost of mined P. Therefore, P is often captured to prevent its release into the environment without beneficial recovery and reuse. However, additional incentives for P recovery emerge when accounting for the total value of P recovery. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the range of benefits of recovering P from waste streams, i.e., the total value of recovering P. This approach accounts for P products, as well as other assets that are associated with P and can be recovered in parallel, such as energy, nitrogen, metals and minerals, and water. Additionally, P recovery provides valuable services to society and the environment by protecting and improving environmental quality, enhancing efficiency of waste treatment facilities, and improving food security and social equity. The needs to make P recovery a reality are also discussed, including business models, bottlenecks, and policy and education strategies.

/pdf/total-value-of-phosphorus-recovery-32gase9ckg.pdf

Total Value of Phosphorus Recovery

Perspectives on anaerobic membrane bioreactor treatment of domestic wastewater: a critical review.

https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/bitstream/10453/122638/4/Xie%20et%20al_Water%20Research%20accepted.pdf

Membrane-based processes for wastewater nutrient recovery: Technology, challenges, and future direction

To employ technologies that sustainably harvest resources from wastewater (for example struvite granules shown here), new perceptions and infrastructure planning and design processes are required.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/es9010515

Linda Kelly

Papers

A new planning and design paradigm to achieve sustainable resource recovery from wastewater