Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
That would be another case of learning from nature.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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"
Counterpoint: Nature doesn't actually assimilate steel girders in any useful way. We use nature for recycling, where nature is good at it. Animal waste for fertilizer, bacteria for waste-water treatment, but it's not some intelligent entity that's "better" at it than us.
Soylent Brown.... shhhhh. it's made with poo!
I might just be cynical, but I never really saw that as fundamentally different that burning people, tossing their ashes into the ocean, and eating the fish that eat the algae that eat their body. It's all just matter at that point.
Eating people is only wrong on two factors.
#1 obvious human pathogen risk
#2 disrespect to those that cared about the deceased.
In the world of Soylent Green, no one cared about those that elected suicide, and they got processed by algae that ate their corpses, limiting the pathogen risk.
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.
> #1 obvious human pathogen risk
While true, this is often overstated I think. This is true of any meat consumption really, especially if not well cooked. Even Kuru has CJD, similar disease from cow consumption. Any bacteria that can live in our flesh can likely live in theirs, and while many viruses are species specific, we have enough similarities for many to cross too.
> #2 disrespect to those that cared about the deceased.
Of course, there are those who don't feel this way. I even know one person who actually expressed that his ideal send off would be for his friends and loved ones to cook and eat his flesh. So whether it is disrespect or respect is really in the eye of the beholder.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
" "Why do the smoke-stacks have those things like balconies around them?" enquired Lenina. "Phosphorus recovery," explained Henry telegraphically. "On their way up the chimney the gases go through four separate treatments. P2O5 used to go right out of circulation every time they cremated some one. Now they recover over ninety-eight per cent of it. More than a kilo and a half per adult corpse. Which makes the best part of four hundred tons of phosphorus every year from England alone." Henry spoke with a happy pride, rejoicing whole-heartedly in the achievement, as though it had been his own. "Fine to think we can go on being socially useful even after we're dead. Making plants grow." Lenina, meanwhile, had turned her eyes away and was looking perpendicularly downwards at the monorail station. "Fine," she agreed. "But queer that Alphas and Betas won't make any more plants grow than those nasty little Gammas and Deltas and Epsilons down there." "All men are physico-chemically equal," said Henry sententiously."
" The Savage was reading Romeo and Juliet aloud–reading (for all the time he was seeing himself as Romeo and Lenina as Juliet) with an intense and quivering passion. Helmholtz had listened to the scene of the lovers' first meeting with a puzzled interest. The scene in the orchard had delighted him with its poetry; but the sentiments expressed had made him smile. Getting into such a state about having a girl–it seemed rather ridiculous. But, taken detail by verbal detail, what a superb piece of emotional engineering! "That old fellow," he said, "he makes our best propaganda technicians look absolutely silly." The Savage smiled triumphantly and resumed his reading. All went tolerably well until, in the last scene of the third act, Capulet and Lady Capulet began to bully Juliet to marry Paris. Helmholtz had been restless throughout the entire scene; but when, pathetically mimed by the Savage, Juliet cried out:
"Is there no pity sitting in the clouds, That sees into the bottom of my grief? O sweet my mother, cast me not away: Delay this marriage for a month, a week; Or, if you do not, make the bridal bed In that dim monument where Tybalt lies "
when Juliet said this, Helmholtz broke out in an explosion of uncontrollable guffawing.
The mother and father (grotesque obscenity) forcing the daughter to have some one she didn't want! And the idiotic girl not saying that she was having some one else whom (for the moment, at any rate) she preferred! In its smutty absurdity the situation was irresistibly comical. He had managed, with a heroic effort, to hold down the mounting pressure of his hilarity; but "sweet mother" (in the Savage's tremulous tone of anguish) and the reference to Tybalt lying dead, but evidently uncremated and wasting his phosphorus on a dim monument, were too much for him. He laughed and laughed till the tears streamed down his face–quenchlessly laughed while, pale with a sense of outrage, the Savage looked at him over the top of his book and then, as the laughter still continued, closed it indignantly, got up and, with the gesture of one who removes his pearl from before swine, locked it away in its drawer. "
-Brave New World
The recognition that running out of phosphorus is serious shit isn't even all that new.
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; }
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 history of 'biosolids' (seriously, that's the PR-speak phrase for composted sewage solids) as fertilizer is a bit mixed.
Assuming you don't fuck up the composting (not always a safe assumption, once the system moves into volume production and management by people who have to make budget) the stuff is largely pathogen free; but that doesn't do anything about anything that microorganisms that thrive on sewage don't help you with. Heavy metals, some drugs, some hormones(synthetic or not), some endocrine disruptors, any random plastics that end up down the sink, and so on. The concentrations aren't apocalyptic; but if you plan on routine use as fertilizer, better hope that they don't build up in the soil...
So called 'class B' sludge, where they don't even bother treating for pathogens, is of course even more fun than 'class A' where you only have to worry about anything that bacteria won't eat.
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!
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.
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.
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?
"systems which fail will cease, and systems which work will succeed" - how, pray-tell, is that not an accurate view of natural systems?
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