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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.
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.
Oh no. There needs to be a law keeping us from running out of "chemicals."
I hereby call on congress to mandate the conservation of mass, in case we run out.
No no, we could get all the phosphorus we need, now and forever, if we could just violate the law of conservation of mass! This is entirely a problem caused by bad legislation! We don't need more, we need congress to repeal the law of conservation of mass!
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
We should limit entropy too. That will stop all of those useful chemicals from being "converted". Reconversion to the true faith of "useful chemicals" is an expense the heretics love making us pay.
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!
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...
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.
In 2012, the USGS estimated 71 billion tons of world reserves, where reserve figures refer to the amount assumed recoverable at current market prices; 0.19 billion tons were mined in 2011.[23] Recent reports suggest that production of phosphorus may have peaked, leading to the possibility of global shortages by 2040.[24] In 2007, at the rate of consumption, the supply of phosphorus was estimated to run out in 345 years.[25] However, some scientists now believe that a "peak phosphorus" will occur in 30 years and that "At current rates, reserves will be depleted in the next 50 to 100 years."[26] Phosphorus comprises about 0.1% by mass of the average rock, and consequently the Earth's supply is vast, although dilute
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphorus#Occurrence.
"Peak phosphorus" sounds like "peak oil", but there does appear to be a number of people afraid of future scarcity. However, the ability to cheaply precipitate phosphorus out of sewage waste (and hopefully, with a few tweaks, out of agricultural runoff also), could significantly reduce dead zones, especially the Gulf of Mexico dead zone. That seems reason enough to pursue this.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Common mineral. Common as dirt.
And yet, the primary industrial source of phosphorous is phosphate rock. Which has to mined. And of which we're running short.
Maybe you should consider that there's a reason for that?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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/...
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.
The annoying thing about 'Peak phosphorus', whenever you think it will actually occur, is that the stuff is drop-dead, full-stop, Not. Replaceable. for biological purposes(barring some seriously radical synthetic biology that makes no use of ATP, among other things). Oil is an absurdly convenient all-in-one energy source and chemical feedstock; but there are plenty of other energy sources and chemical feedstocks, albeit generally more inconvenient and/or expensive in some way. Phosphorus, though, is do or die for life as we know it.
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.
I'm not sure this is a job for congress. I believe this is a problem that creationists should be working on. If they can pull this one off they will demonstrate their superiority over that satanical ideology called science.
sigo ergo sum
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
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
When the natural deposits are gone, we'll mine the garbage dumps where lots of it ends up as bones, sewage sludge, and so on. And, while it would be energy intensive, there are undersea deposits yet untouched, and ultimately the seas themselves can be filtered for phosphorous -- it's where all the runoff, most of the bird guano, and all the sealife-sequestered phosphorus ends up anyway.
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.