Blog from the Environmental Engineering Research Group at SLU
Luis Fernando Perez Mercado successfully defended his thesis âFarm-based technologies for management of risks from irrigation with wastewater-polluted sources in Cochabamba, Boliviaâ on April 16.
Link to thesis: https://pub.epsilon.slu.se/16783/1/perez_mercado_l_200324.pdf
A totally new concept with having the evaluation performed over link. All was working well and the defence was a success!
Pictures from defence: https://photos.app.goo.gl/vHkR5kvaSPQv1xcp9
We at Kretsloppsteknik have been very active in community outreach and in engaging the public with our research and educational activities. Continuing this tradition, this week you find us at Fyrisov in Uppsala where we have a booth to participate in SciFest 2020 – an inspirational science festival for school students, young researchers and innovators that is co-organized by Uppsala University and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. At our booth, we are demonstrating to young minds how we can separately collect and recycle different fractions from the household. We have the crowd stopping black soldier fly larvae composting, a urine-diverting dry toilet and dried urine fertiliser, single use biodegradable PeePoo toilets, biochar filters, and props showcasing how much waste we produce every day per person. All members of the group have taken turns to be at the booth – to talk to kids and inspire them to think differently and see value in what society considers waste. It is quite amazing to see, hear and interact with kids of every age group that stop by our stall. Many were quite active, touching and holding the BSF larvae, bringing their friends to do the same, and appreciating the thinking and reasoning behind recycling waste fractions.
On 7th February, we inaugurated our new urine-diverting toilet here at the department of energy and technology, at SLU’s Ultuna campus. The installation was made possible due to a grant from SLU-climate fund that financed the installation together with the Save! Urine diverting flushed toilet from Laufen and SLU’s landlord Akademiska hus. The existing conventional toilet was exchanged with the new Laufen toilet âSave!â as a permanent installation. The urine is led out from the wall and connected to the test bed (the larger box on the side into where the urine drying equipment is installed).
Towards the end of January, Jenna Senecal and Viktoria Wiklicky from Kretsloppsteknik were in Tampere, Finland to decomission our 25 L/day urine drying system that was in operation at the basement of Lielahti Manor house. The system was in use in between June 2019 and January 2020, and was a great showcase of the group’s and Sanitation360 AB’s on-site urine treatment technology, alkaline urine dehydration. Through this project, we demonstrated to our various Finnish partners that our technology is scalable, socio-technically feasbile, and marks a significant step away from erstwhile urine processing technologies. We are very thankful to our various collaborators, partners and stakeholders that helped make this a successful pilot project – Tampere City, Tampere University of Applied Sciences, Hiedanranta Development Programme, city workers, officials, plumbers, subcontractors, research interns, and others.
My name is Natnael Girma, Iâm a Ph.D. student from Ethiopia. Iâm currently working on a research project on safe nutrient recovery from source separated urine for sustainable fertilizer production. I recently joined the energy and technology department (kretsloppsteknik unit) at SLU, as a licentiate student to do my research project. The project focuses on assessing adsorptive characteristics of pharmaceuticals during the production of urine-based fertilizers and the fate of pharmaceuticals during their end-use in agriculture. The second part of the research focuses on the microbial safety of using dry urine-based fertilizers in perspective of abundance of horizontally transmissible antibiotic resistant gene element.
In October 2019, Jenna Senecal travelled to Arles, France, to connect with Nick Davies from peeKeep. Nick has designed a new toilet and cabin and wanted to test how our alkaline dehydration technology could be integrated. The toilet uses a conveyer belt to transport the excreta and toilet paper to a drying chamber outside (the black PVC unit). While the urine is drained and collected for alkaline treatment (the black and grey sheet metal box). Nick will be building more of these toilets to be installed in various locations in southern France. The aim is to have all systems (light inside the cabin, toilet, excreta treatment) running off of solar voltaics.
Masteruppsatsen TeknikutvĂ€rdering av Urintorkning i Pilotskala â ett FĂ€ltförsök i Finland (författare Caroline Karlsson) finns nu publicerad pĂ„ DiVA. I det spĂ€nnande masterprojektet testades urinsorteringsteknologin för första gĂ„ngen i fĂ€ltförhĂ„llanden pĂ„ en militĂ€ranlĂ€ggning i sydvĂ€stra Finland. Uppsatsen kan lĂ€sas pĂ„: http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:1374211
The master thesis, Technical Evaluation of Urine Drying in Pilot Scale â a Field Experiment in Finland (author Caroline Karlsson), is now published at the DiVA portal. In this interesting master project the urine drying technology was tested for the first time in field conditions at a military base in southwestern Finland. For more information: http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:1374211
This study investigated the occurrence and removal in wastewater and water bodies in Nakivubo wetland area and Inner Murchison Bay, Lake Victoria, of common prescription and non-prescription pharmaceutically-active substances (PhACs) sold in Kampala city, Uganda. A questionnaire was sent to 20 pharmacies in Kampala, to identify the most commonly sold PhACs in the city. During two sampling campaigns, samples were collected from Bugolobi wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) influent and effluent and surface water samples from Nakivubo channel, Nakivubo wetland and Inner Murchison Bay. The concentrations of 28 PhACs, organic matter, solids and nutrients in water samples were analysed. Ciprofloxacin (antibiotic), cetirizine (anti-allergy), metformin (anti-diabetes), metronidazole (antibiotic) and omeprazole (gastric therapy) were reported by pharmacies to be the PhACs most commonly sold in the study area. Chemical analysis of water samples revealed that trimethoprim (antibiotic) and sulfamethoxazole (antibiotic) were the dominant PhACs in water from all sites except Lake Victoria.
Like many low-income countries, Uganda is struggling to provide sanitation to its inhabitants. Meeting the Sustainable Development Goal related to sanitation (SDG6) will require major investments in sanitation. This study uses the concept of service regimes to analyze existing sanitation infrastructure and services and their respective costs. The service regimes investigated are the sewage regime and the fecal sludge (FS) regime. The results show that approximately 56% of the fecal flow in Kampala is estimated as âsafely managedâ. The results also show that the annual per capita costs for the sewage regime (USD 186) are more than 13-fold those for the FS regime (USD 14). Additionally, there are large differences in subsidies between the regimes. When allocating public funds, decision-makers are advised to consider (i) number of customers within regimes, (ii) total capital and operating costs of services, (iii) cost allocation between stakeholders, and (iv) infrastructure performance.
McConville, J. R., Kvarnström, E., Maiteki, J. M., & Niwagaba, C. B. (2019). Infrastructure investments and operating costs for fecal sludge and sewage treatment systems in Kampala, Uganda. Urban Water Journal, 1-10.