Blog from the Environmental Engineering Research Group at SLU
Framtidens Bonde är en webbinarieserier som diskuterar framtidsbranscherna, de gröna näringarna. På tisdag den 12 september ska Cecilia Lalander från Kretsloppsteknikgruppen vara med och diskutera om Insekter kan skapa nya intäkter i jordbruket.
Om du vill anmäla dig går det att göra här.
Om du vill vara med och lyssna:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/737189641508397
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/events/7097195613091487744/comments/
Two members of the Kretsloppsteknik’s BSF group will attend the INSECTA 2023 conference in Magdeburg, Germany, which is being organized by Pilot Pflanzenöltechnologie Magdeburg e.V. (PPM), on September 13-14th. Ivã Guidini Lopes and the PhD candidate Lovisa Lindberg will be presenting two ongoing studies on the topic of organic waste treatment with BSF larvae. Ivã will hold an oral presentation regarding the inactivation of pathogens by BSF larvae in a large-scale setting, entitled “Safety assessment of black soldier fly larvae reared on food waste” and Lovisa will present her recent findings on the bioconversion of greenhouse waste with BSF larvae, also as an oral presentation entitled “Practical adjustments in fly larvae composting when treating plant-based waste”. The complete program for the conference can be accessed by clicking here.
If you’re also participating here, we would love to chat with you, perhaps over lunch or dinner during the conference! Feel free to send me an email or a message about this to iva.guidini.lopes@slu.se or lovisa.lindberg@slu.se.
Chea Eliyan, a PhD student from the group attended WWW 2023 in Stockholm from August 20-24. WWW is annual event organized by SIWI. For this year, it sets out to tackle the questions under the theme, Seed of Change: Innovative Solutions for a Water-Wise World.
Many side events, exhibitions from various stakeholder, as well as a wide range of topics presented during those four days event. It was a great opportunity for her to learn and networking with different people in the field for her future career. Despite attended the selected sessions which are related to wastewater reuse and resource recovery, Eliyan got a chance to talk to some of the researchers from who she previously only had read their publications. It was an impressive event and Eliyan is looking forward to be part of it next year.
The flagship report of the UN Environment Programme (#UNEP) and Global Wastewater Initiative (#GWWI) was recently released at the #WorldWaterWeek in Stockholm a few days ago! Prithvi Simha from the group contributed to the report as one of the authors.
This new report, “Wastewater – Turning problem to solution” urges decision makers and action takers from all regions of the world to implement the three key actions, to overcome some or all seven barriers, and to put in place all or some of the six building blocks, described in the publication.
The report features SLU – Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Sanitation360 AB‘s work on #urine #recycling in the form of three case studies:
1. Producing urine-based fertilizer on the island of Gotland, Sweden (work from our #N2brew and P2GreeN #EUH2020 projects)
2. Urine separation – Alkaline dehydration in practice in #Malmö, Sweden (work from our REWAISE EU project)
3. Social barriers to urine recycling in decentralized sanitation systems.
Hi, my name is Jacob Fager. I’m stationed on Gotland and my main task is to collect urine. I used to be a soldier since I finished school 2016 but now I’m about to study to become a farmer. I grew up on my family’s farm, so it has always been in my interest. While I’m waiting on my studies to start I will be helping this interesting project and hoping I will lucky to be able to use human urine fertilizer on my future farm.
We are looking forward to attending the 6th International Water Association Conference on eco-Technologies for Wastewater Treatment (#ecoSTP23) in #Girona this month, between June 26th to 29th. Prithvi Simha and PhD candidates from our group, Anuron Deka, Abood Alahmad, and Chibambila Simbeye will be presenting on a range of topics that we have been investigating over the past year including i) the use of #biopolymers for chemical dosing of urine, ii) precipitation of #vivianite from urine and iii) diffusion barriers and #upscaling potential for #urine #recycling.
If you’re also participating here, we would love to chat with you, perhaps over lunch or dinner during the conference! Feel free to send me (Prithvi.Simha@slu.se) an email or a message about this.
PS. Some of us from the IWA Resource-Oriented Sanitation Specialist Group also plan to have dinner together on the sidelines of the conference.
Ya Gao comes from China and previously received her Master’s degree in Environmental Technology at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands and her Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Sciences at Tongji University in China. After the graduation from her previous study, Ya Gao worked in a green building sustainable consultancy company in Shanghai as a project engineer for one and a half years. In May 2023, Ya Gao has joined the Kretsloppsteknik group as a PhD student working for the EU project P2Green. The main focus for her PhD study will be the urine dehydration research that aims at dehydrating the acid-stabilized human urine and recovering the nutrients contained in the urine for the use of plant fertilizers.
The Kretsloppsteknik group travelled to Gotland earlier this week and spent a few days in Visby, a town that many of us described as “quaint”, “charming”, and “serene”. It was wonderful to be together in such a setting, and spend some quality time together away from our usual offices. During the trip, we reflected a lot on where we are today as a group, our common goals and shared vision for global sustainability, and how we could reach these goals. We plan to summarise all these discussions in the form of a “group opinion paper”, where we will present how we think our research can contribute to circular economies in the urban sanitation and waste management space. Stay tuned 🙂
Sanitation360 (spin-off company from our urine drying group at Kretsloppsteknik, SLU) has been awarded the Innovative Startups Step 2 by Vinnova. During 2021-2022, Sanitation360 used the funds from Step 1 to assess the market potential for manufacturing and selling the urine-drying technology in South Africa. During that time, S360 found the partners perfect partners – Scandinavian Water and Sanitation and Sanitation Ambassadors. Together, they will design, build and implement the drying system in South Africa. The generated fertilizer will also be used. The project runs from now till May 2024. Stay tuned for more up-dates.
More about the funding: Companies that have further need for financing after Innovative Startups step 1, finalized a project in step 1, can apply for funding in step 2. In step 2, Vinnova can contribute up to 90 % of the project budget, up to a maximum of 900,000 SEK. More information about the Vinnova funding can be found here: https://www.vinnova.se/en/calls-for-proposals/innovative-startups/
In the latest article published in Science of the Total Environment (STOTEN), Prithvi Simha and colleagues (Chibambila Simbeye, Caitlin Courtney, and Nico Fischer) show for the first time that we can produce vivianite from human urine. For those who don’t know, vivianite is iron phosphate ((Fe(II)3(PO4)3·8H2O) and is in high demand in the electronics industry for lithium-ion battery production as well as in the art industry as a pigment in paint. It can be sold for as much as $100-500 per kg. Considering that struvite and calcium phosphate can typically only be sold for $1 kg−1, recovering P as vivianite would likely be significantly more profitable.
In this work we determined ideal operating regions for vivianite production from human urine. We showed that overdosing iron exerted a competitive effect that suppressed the precipitation of other precipitates and could also compensate for changing urine compositions. Overall, the highest yield and purity was 93% and 79% respectively. We showed that the presence of organics in real urine ultimately affected the purity. Thank you to the Water Research Commission for funding this work and to the SLU – Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences‘s August T Larsson Guest Research program for Dyllon’s current research visit to SLU.
