Tag: Source-separating sanitation systems

We have exciting news! The Swedish Research Council FORMAS has granted funding for our project called RECAPTURE: Circular Economy Certification and Production of Urine Fertiliser. RECAPTURE is a collaboration between #SLU, #Sanitation360, #Ecoloop and #RISE, and has 3 short-term goals: 1) optimization of fertiliser formation to work with conventional farming equipment; 2) review the applicability of SPCR178 certification for urine and other emerging products; 3) conceptual idea of a tag-on to fertiliser certifications to include environmental aspects.

My name is Jade Borel and I come from France, Grenoble. I am in the third year of environmental engineering school in Rennes. At SLU, I am part of the urine drying research team. I will work with urease enzyme and analyse how urine salts affect  enzymatic activity. My intership started early November and I will be staying until the end of January.

My name is Liudmila Nazarova and I am coming from Russia, Saint-Petersburg. I am a fourth-year Environmental Engineering student at Tampere University of Applied Science (Finland). I am part of the Kretsloppsteknik research team at SLU. I am working on the fate and chemical degradation of biodegradable polymers in wastewater at different process conditions. I will be working in the group from September until the end of November.

We’re happy to share that the #Bolivia project on #urinedrying that we started in 2018 will continue for another four years through new funding from Vetenskapsrådet / Swedish Research Council. In the project, we will be developing novel chemical pellets that can capture all the nutrients in urine, while removing organics pollutants and malodour-causing substances. The pellets will be evaluated against real-life aspects and natural contaminants before they are field-tested in urban settings in Bolivia. Project partners in Boliva include Luis Fernando Perez Mercado and Mercedes Iriarte from Centro de Aguas y Saneamiento Ambiental  at the University of San Simon in Cochabamba.

Link: https://www.slu.se/en/ew-news/2022/11/fundings-from-vr/

We had the joy, after waiting for two years, due to COVID, to finally listen to Madeleine Fogde’s lecture “Communication counts” as a part of the program of becoming honorary doctor at the NJ faculty at SLU. It was interesting to hear about the importance of communication and how a response to a question about how to construct sustainable sanitation after a natural disaster in Mozambique, that was answered by Prof Emeritus Håkan Jönsson and lead to several installations of ecological sanitation systems during the 1990-ies. Later this also lead to a long-term collaboration on sustainable sanitation and now we say welcome for becoming a part of SLU. Madeleine’s presentation starts 14 min into the video below.

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