Kretsloppsteknik

Priscila de Morais Lima and Jennifer McConville recently published a paper in the Journal Science of the Total Environment in collaboration with Thais Andrade de Sampaio Lopes and Luciano Matos Queiroz from Brazil.  They looked into resource recovery appropriate technologies for wastewater treatment in Brazil by coupling the Santiago software and Life Cycle Assessment to generate appropriate scenarios and to assess the environmental impacts. Their comparison between the scenarios generated by Santiago and the baseline of UASB reactors showed that urine and faeces separation with soil application performed best in most categories. As also verified in several other LCA papers, electricity and transport play major roles in sanitation systems; and even though the UASB reactors had high CO₂ emissions, it has potential for resource recovery.

Abstract

Implementation of resource recovery technologies is becoming increasingly important as humans are exhausting the world’s natural resources. Recovering nutrients and water from wastewater treatment systems will play an important role in changing the current trends towards a circular economy. However, guidance is still needed to determine the most appropriate way to do this. In this study, two decision-support tools, sanitation planning software (Santiago) and life cycle assessment (LCA), were applied to identify appropriate technologies and their environmental impacts. As a case study, current and alternative scenarios for a wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) in Campo Grande, west-central Brazil, were used. Among 12 scenarios provided by Santiago for efficient nutrient recovery, eight were selected for further assessment. The current WWTP system (UASB reactors) resulted in the highest negative impacts in two of nine assessment categories (freshwater and marine eutrophication) due to nutrient discharge into water. A source separation scenario with urine stored in a urine bank and co-composting of faeces showed the best overall performance. Electricity consumption played a crucial role in impacts in several categories, while water consumption was not significantly affected by choice of the toilet. One Santiago scenario matched the most appropriate scenario with the best environmental performance, but the other seven scenarios were not as beneficial, indicating a need for some adjustments in the software. These results highlight the importance of performing LCA to compare alternative scenarios, even when using a tool designed to identify locally appropriate technologies. The results also indicate that the current wastewater treatment system has reasonable environmental performance but could be improved if measures were taken to recover energy and reuse water.

The full paper is available: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969722028741

Prithvi has joined the editorial board of the journal, Frontiers in Chemical Engineering, as associate editor for the speciality section Environmental Chemical Engineering. The journal publishes rigorously high-impact research on all topics related to chemical engineering, while the speciality section explores opportunities in chemical engineering aimed at addressing environmental problems. Read more here: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/chemical-engineering/sections/environmental-chemical-engineering

During the Medieval Week, the N2Brew urine project from the group featured strongly in Gotland. In Collaboration with TouchDown Gotland, two female urinals from Lapee have been installed in Visby. Here more about it from Jenna Senecal who was interviewed on P4 Radio: https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/urin-blir-till-vaxtnaring-genom-gotlands-forsta-urinoarer-for-kvinnor

We are very happy that starting next year Dyllon Randall from the University of Cape Town will be at our group as the August T Larsson guest researcher. He will spend one month per semester at SLU over three years, teaching, supervising and working with researchers at the NJ faculty.

Randall’s guest researchership will cement the collaboration between UCT’s Future Water Institute and the SLU. This partnership began in March 2020 when he was invited to work with SLU’s Kretsloppsteknik Research Group in the niche area of urine source-separation-based sanitation systems. Randall and the group’s Bjorn Vinnerås and Prithvi Simha are among a handful of global experts who have been systematically working to develop circular sanitation technologies.

At SLU, the Faculty of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences has set aside funds to support internationalization of research in the field of global development. The NJ Faculty Committee on Global Development conducts calls for funds. During this year’s call, two applications were approved, out of which one was decided in Prithvi’s favor. With this funding, Prithvi and his colleagues in Namibia will be able to kickoff a project that they call “WATERSIDE”. The overall goal will be to create the groundwork for developing a transdisciplinary living lab – WATERSIDE (WATER Sanitation In ariD rEgions) focused on education, research and innovation within the subject area of water and sanitation in arid regions. The Kretsloppsteknik Research Group at SLU and the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST) are the main partners. In addition, GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit), the Gobabeb Desert Research Institute and Development Workshop Namibia (DW-N) will be involved, while the City of Windhoek, Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia (SDFN) and Environmental Lawyers Network of Namibia will be associated. The idea is to conduct a series of three workshops in Namibia over the course of the next year, so keep an eye out on our blog to hear more about WATERSIDE.