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Device Mines Precious Phosphorus From Sewage
ckwu writes "Scientists predict that the scarcity of phosphorus will increase over the next few decades as the growing demand for agricultural fertilizer depletes geologic reserves of the element. Meanwhile, phosphates released from wastewater into natural waterways can cause harmful algal blooms and low-oxygen conditions that can threaten to kill fish. Now a team of researchers has designed a system that could help solve both of these problems. It captures phosphorus from sewage waste and delivers clean water using a combined osmosis-distillation process. The system improves upon current methods by reducing the amounts of chemicals needed to precipitate a phosphorus mineral from the wastewater, thus bringing down the cost of the recovery process."
It was a hard day down in the device mines. :(
Sewage is one thing, but if we can mine storm drains where the golf course runoff goes, that is where this device would be extremely useful.
Good thing it uses fewer chemicals to precipitate the phosphorus, we'd be in real trouble if we ran out of those chemicals.
Every utopian prediction for the future from the most authoritarian to anarchist depends on humanity getting very good at recycling. Every new process that can get something valuable from *ahem* unsorted wastes is a step to a positive need-free future.
all they need to do now is fix their filters and this will work. SWING AND A MISS!
the most cost effective WMD http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=phosphorous+weapon
So what about the gold mine in the supposedly massive dead zones in places like the Gulf of Mexico from agricultural run off? How can we reclaim that?
But rapid-composting systems will render sewage into safe, non-smelly fertilizer in a year, provided you're not full of medications or using any fiendish chemicals. It'll get all the rest of the nutrients too. Really, all we need to do is replicate and rev up a natural system, and reclaim *all* the nutrients. There's a reason we aren't all drowning in dinosaur shit.
Seriously, a fancy jig to get just one nutrient back sounds like a money grab rather than a working whole system.
Soylent Brown.... shhhhh. it's made with poo!
All you need to make it work is energy.
You do know where those storm drains lead to, right?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Well... er... not actually...
But it's a cool idea...
Depends on how the sewage system is designed. The storm sewers ended up always at the waste water plant but may make a detour into a retention recreational flood lake depending on the neighborhood. Where I grew up most of the water in the city went thru the sewage plant first. That included drain off. They had overflows built in incase of storms. So the storm water would be filtered as well as the nastier stuff. But the nastier stuff always got priority before dumping it into a river at about 99% clean.
feels like that
Common mineral. Common as dirt.
Where you do people find these articles?
It varies from municipality to municipality. Some directly drain into local streams, others go into sewer systems, and some have separate systems.
Storm drains generally separate from the sewage system; the cost of treating hundreds of thousands of gallons of extra rainwater would bankrupt most communities. That's why it's usually illegal to dump waste into the storm drains.
:) Thanks for that.
+1
In my area, yes I do. Straight into the bay.
When this happens, then maybe we can get phosphates back into our laundry detergent.
Unless your town is getting fined by the EPA, they go somewhere other than into the sanitary sewers. Every flash flood is not an excuse to have excrement in the streets.
I'm my 1940s neighborhood, there are warning signs on all the storm drains that they go directly into the creek, and that no dumping is allowed.
In the overall city, though, any stormwater system installed after 2000 (at least, maybe earlier) has to send its water through the sewer system to be processed. I thought that was required nationwide, but maybe it's because of specific EPA requirements on our creeks (some of which have tested poorly for various contaminants).
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Or, perhaps retain storm drainage on golf courses so their fertilizer doesn't end up in streams to begin with. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... If golf courses and farmers wouldn't mow and plow right down to the water and then over-fertilize, we could reduce phosphorus in streams a ton. If you're interested in the health of golf course sized stream in the US, I recommend checking out the EPA Wadeable Stream Assessment (I worked on the field work in Arkansas) http://water.epa.gov/type/rsl/...
Check out Ostara. http://www.ostara.com/
Gollum: We wants it, we needs it. Must have the precious phosphorous. They stole it from us.
General Jack D. Ripper: Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious phosphorous without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
And if we aren't, then why aren't we? Night soil's a really good idea, even if culturally icky for Westerners.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
A community-scale pilot project by the Rich Earth Institute is demonstrating a fairly low-tech and cost-effective way to reclaim two thirds of the phosphorus and 85% of the nitrogen from human waste: recycling urine (which is nearly sterile and can be further sanitized very easily) directly into fertilizer. (Yes, #1 really does have a lot more fertilizer value than #2!) It's also being done in various public projects in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and by lots of gardeners around the world. There's also this book that talks about the history of urine as an industrial feedstock and modern methods for using it as a fertilizer at large or small scale.
but if we can mine storm drains where the golf course runoff goes
I was thinking, if we can mine golf courses . . .
It would certainly make the game more exciting to watch on TV.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Good idea- replicate and rev up a natural system, and just farm the P from sewer plants in Jurassic Park. You ever run across a pile of dinosaur shit? It ain't pretty, but sometimes when I get the munchies I think of all that delicious P I could have scooped off, probably more P than those bags of Cheetos in my closet.
We don't need to limit entropy, all we need to do is deny it exists, We can be Entropy Deniers. Works for Global Warming why not Entropy.
Don't worry Citizen, consume and obey secure in the knowledge that your job creators have your best interests at heart.
Space for the Species! (tm)
Depends, places with older systems (e.g. NYC) have combined storm and sanitary sewers. The problem isn't excrement in the streets, but that sustained heavy rains overload the sewage treatment. In practice some nasty stuff gets dumped into waters around NYC when that happens.
Exactly the opposite:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Combined sewer systems mostly predate the development of sewage treatment and only about 13% of the US is currently served by a system where sewage and storm water are sent through the same pipe. The remaining hold outs are largely being forced to separate their systems by the EPA to comply with the Clean Water Act.
"If golf courses and farmers wouldn't mow and plow right down to the water and then over-fertilize, we could reduce phosphorus in streams a ton."
I was wondering when someone was going to mention farming. In the overall scheme of things, golf courses mean next to nothing.
That's because NYC's sewer system is so old that when it was originally built, there was no such thing as a sewage treatment plant. They could use one set of pipes because everything was just getting dumped into the harbor anyways. Now that they have plants, they retain a problem of having to dump untreated sewage in the harbor when the plants get overloaded during storms.
If your municipal water system was built after activated sludge control became common in the 1930s, storm water is probably handled separately from sanitary sewage.
So the crowned heads of science have just figured out that if there's a shortage of agricultural phosphorus and a surplus of it in sewage? Why not just funnel the sewage, after primary treatment to break the disease transmission cycle, right onto our fields? A variation of this is being done in Phoenix, where the municipal wastewater is used as the heat sink for the city nuclear plant, in the process being boiled off to sludge. The sludge is then dumped onto the cotton fields surrounding the plant.
Actually the dinosaurs achieved perfect recycling which is why you find only bones and no other artifacts. It turned out when nothing was permanent or well made, they all lost the will to live, and died of a deep malaise.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Your link refutes your claim. The issues described on Wikipedia are for Combined Sewage Overflow (CSO), in which the combination of stormwater runoff and human sewage are discharged directly in the lakes and streams. That's what the EPA is restricting per the link, not the processing of stormwater via the sewer system in the same, safe way and human sewage, as I described going on in my city.
The Wikipedia article describes, as one remedy for CSO, the creation of a second sewer system for stormwater runoff. Ostensibly that's what my city is doing - sending the stormwater into the sewer system to be processed (just not the same sewer system as human waste).
Alternatively, some cities are expanding their (single) sewer system to accommodate both. Other cities are creating surface-level systems (stormwater detention/retention ponds, vegetated filter strips) to slow and filter stormwater using things other than the sewer system. But the important part isn't that stormwater and human sewage are treated separately; the important part is that A) stormwater is treated, at all, so that street runoff doesn't end up unfiltered in the creeks and lakes, and B) that human sewage is never allowed to overflow into the creeks and lakes under any circumstances.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I read the summary twice and thought... WHAT phosphorous shortage?? "Scientists predict..." Is this a joke? I found this article that agrees with me. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ti...
Perhaps the original "source" thought that a finite mineral "reserve" meant the resource itself is finite. The current phosphorous mining operations find enough to last 300 years and then stop exploring for it (making a fininite "reserve" of what they've found). We are going to run out of lots of other things (like tin and copper, sea floor minining is going to be UGLY) before we have to send anyone into the pee-pee mines. I have a limited number of socks in my sock drawer, but it doesn't mean there's a socks shortage, or that we need to mine them from coffins.
Gently reply
In a garbage dump + whatever has changed since the garbage got there.
Robots mining garbage dumps is the future. And dumped countries (China, Africa other poor areas) will be the superpowers of recycling and resources.
Originally, most phosphate production came from guano (basically petrified seabird poop). It was so strategically valuable, that the USA was allowing people to annex islands and exercise mining rights with US military backing. The country of Nauru (aka Pleasant Island) once based their entire economy on it.
Of course, as with most things, we literally ate it all up (it's used to make fertilizer for plants) and now we rely on other sources. Then of course there are people that argue we have reached peak phosphorus production of all possible sources...
What resource shall we queue up next in our sky-is-falling headline of-the-week?
Yes, some cities are making other arrangements because digging up the entire sewer system to modernize it is prohibitively expensive. But as the article indicates, only a small number of communities are doing so ("About 772 communities in the United States have combined sewer systems, serving about 40 million people"). No one is building new systems that way.
Even if your community is being force to treat its runoff, I'd wager the storm water is still arriving at the treatment plant via an entirely independent pipe system than the sanitary sewer. If not, then you ought to prosecute whoever was in charge of designing it because they were incompetent to the point of negligence.
But at least farms serve a purpose. Undoubtedly we should reduce fertilizer usage on farms (there are ways to do it without affecting yield) but it should be banned altogether on golf courses, and seriously limited on lawns. What is it with golfers and pretty green fairways anyhow? The original Scots golfers would have laughed at them, and pointed out that if you need such manicured fairways you just don't know how to play.
Even if the phosphorus 'shortage' isn't a valid reason for this tech, algal blooms ARE a serious threat to farming & fisheries produce, as well as native wildlife.
http://www.mdba.gov.au/river-data/water-quality/bga
I for one cannot wait to see these installed along the banks of the Murray-Darling River
Golf courses use very little phosphorus fertilizer, mostly nitrogen.
We turned into scatterers from gatherers.
Don't you think?
Phosphorus shortages have already happened. A lot of farms suffered a few years ago when an intentional shortage spiked prices to 10x normal. There really aren't many places left where you can cheaply shovel high grade ore.
Aside from the supply, which is large but has already been manipulated, lets look at the pollution. If we can recover phosphorous from rivers for anything close to the cost of mining it this will be a huge benefit. We could reduce dead zones and improve river ecosystems which would have an enormous economic benefit.
If drifting piles of socks made giant areas around cemeteries uninhabitable and people remember paying $100 per sock a few years back maybe coffin-mining would be studied. I don't see any reason it is a bad idea to recover a valuable resource that is doing harm downstream.
Man, you really need that seminar!
At least any new stormwater runoff is being treated, unlike in my neighborhood. Surface runoff after storms was what the EPA hit us for, since what they found were IIRC particulates from vehicle deposits, or something like that.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.