Wasting Water, No More

At the Aslan Biomass biogas plant in Ankara, Türkiye, the team at NPHarvest celebrates their concept at an industrial scale to recover valuable nutrients from wastewater, making “what used to be a headache into a resource.” The company’s clever marketing proclaims, “We recover value from your sludge, or [insert other flashing descriptive words] side stream, digestate, manure,” you get the point. Their circular plan will offer municipalities, farmers, and biogas plant operators a proprietary process, based on hydrophobic membrane stripping, to recover nitrogen as a pure ammonia salt and phosphorus as amorphous calcium phosphate directly from wastewater streams, including black water, liquid digestate, and manure. Both minerals are not only useful but necessary for fertilizer production.

In Ankara, NPHarvest’s technology is expected to recover nutrients at a rate equivalent to approximately 93 tonnes of ammonium sulfate and up to 73 tonnes of phosphorus-based product in one year, with the potential to recover 3,255 tonnes of ammonium sulfate and 2,555 tonnes of phosphorus-based product through a full-scale installation. These recovered nutrients would otherwise be lost in wastewater, often leading to environmental damage and wasted economic potential.

The Aslan Biomass facility, which previously trucked nutrient-rich wastewater to regional fields and farms, is reaching its capacity for nutrient load. It will now recover resources on-site, cutting environmental impact and operating costs. Türkiye, with over 2,000 wastewater treatment plants and a growing cleantech ecosystem, offers