Device Mines Precious Phosphorus From Sewage 96
ckwu writes "Scientists predict that the scarcity of phosphorus will increase over the next few decades as the growing demand for agricultural fertilizer depletes geologic reserves of the element. Meanwhile, phosphates released from wastewater into natural waterways can cause harmful algal blooms and low-oxygen conditions that can threaten to kill fish. Now a team of researchers has designed a system that could help solve both of these problems. It captures phosphorus from sewage waste and delivers clean water using a combined osmosis-distillation process. The system improves upon current methods by reducing the amounts of chemicals needed to precipitate a phosphorus mineral from the wastewater, thus bringing down the cost of the recovery process."
A hard day... (Score:5, Funny)
It was a hard day down in the device mines. :(
Re:A hard day...Mining bulshit (Score:2)
I read the summary twice and thought... WHAT phosphorous shortage?? "Scientists predict..." Is this a joke? I found this article that agrees with me. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ti... [forbes.com]
Perhaps the original "source" thought that a finite mineral "reserve" meant the resource itself is finite. The current phosphorous mining operations find enough to last 300 years and then stop exploring for it (making a fininite "reserve" of what they've found). We are going to run out of lots of other things (like tin
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Even if the phosphorus 'shortage' isn't a valid reason for this tech, algal blooms ARE a serious threat to farming & fisheries produce, as well as native wildlife.
http://www.mdba.gov.au/river-data/water-quality/bga
I for one cannot wait to see these installed along the banks of the Murray-Darling River
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Aside from the supply, which is large but has already been manipulated, lets look at the pollution. If we can recover phosphorous from rivers for anything close to the cost of mining it this will be a huge benefit. We could reduce dead zones and improve river ecosystems which would have
Now if we can get this device onto storm drains... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sewage is one thing, but if we can mine storm drains where the golf course runoff goes, that is where this device would be extremely useful.
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You do know where those storm drains lead to, right?
Re:Now if we can get this device onto storm drains (Score:5, Informative)
It varies from municipality to municipality. Some directly drain into local streams, others go into sewer systems, and some have separate systems.
Re:Now if we can get this device onto storm drains (Score:5, Informative)
Storm drains generally separate from the sewage system; the cost of treating hundreds of thousands of gallons of extra rainwater would bankrupt most communities. That's why it's usually illegal to dump waste into the storm drains.
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I'm my 1940s neighborhood, there are warning signs on all the storm drains that they go directly into the creek, and that no dumping is allowed.
In the overall city, though, any stormwater system installed after 2000 (at least, maybe earlier) has to send its water through the sewer system to be processed. I thought that was required nationwide, but maybe it's because of specific EPA requirements on our creeks (some of which have tested poorly for various contaminants).
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Exactly the opposite:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... [wikipedia.org]
Combined sewer systems mostly predate the development of sewage treatment and only about 13% of the US is currently served by a system where sewage and storm water are sent through the same pipe. The remaining hold outs are largely being forced to separate their systems by the EPA to comply with the Clean Water Act.
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Your link refutes your claim. The issues described on Wikipedia are for Combined Sewage Overflow (CSO), in which the combination of stormwater runoff and human sewage are discharged directly in the lakes and streams. That's what the EPA is restricting per the link, not the processing of stormwater via the sewer system in the same, safe way and human sewage, as I described going on in my city.
The Wikipedia article describes, as one remedy for CSO, the creation of a second sewer system for stormwater runoff
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Yes, some cities are making other arrangements because digging up the entire sewer system to modernize it is prohibitively expensive. But as the article indicates, only a small number of communities are doing so ("About 772 communities in the United States have combined sewer systems, serving about 40 million people"). No one is building new systems that way.
Even if your community is being force to treat its runoff, I'd wager the storm water is still arriving at the treatment plant via an entirely indepen
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At least any new stormwater runoff is being treated, unlike in my neighborhood. Surface runoff after storms was what the EPA hit us for, since what they found were IIRC particulates from vehicle deposits, or something like that.
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Depends, places with older systems (e.g. NYC) have combined storm and sanitary sewers. The problem isn't excrement in the streets, but that sustained heavy rains overload the sewage treatment. In practice some nasty stuff gets dumped into waters around NYC when that happens.
Re:Now if we can get this device onto storm drains (Score:4, Informative)
That's because NYC's sewer system is so old that when it was originally built, there was no such thing as a sewage treatment plant. They could use one set of pipes because everything was just getting dumped into the harbor anyways. Now that they have plants, they retain a problem of having to dump untreated sewage in the harbor when the plants get overloaded during storms.
If your municipal water system was built after activated sludge control became common in the 1930s, storm water is probably handled separately from sanitary sewage.
Re:Now if we can get this device onto storm drains (Score:5, Informative)
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"If golf courses and farmers wouldn't mow and plow right down to the water and then over-fertilize, we could reduce phosphorus in streams a ton."
I was wondering when someone was going to mention farming. In the overall scheme of things, golf courses mean next to nothing.
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But at least farms serve a purpose. Undoubtedly we should reduce fertilizer usage on farms (there are ways to do it without affecting yield) but it should be banned altogether on golf courses, and seriously limited on lawns. What is it with golfers and pretty green fairways anyhow? The original Scots golfers would have laughed at them, and pointed out that if you need such manicured fairways you just don't know how to play.
Re:Now if we can get this device onto storm drains (Score:5, Funny)
but if we can mine storm drains where the golf course runoff goes
I was thinking, if we can mine golf courses . . .
It would certainly make the game more exciting to watch on TV.
Re:Subject goes here (Score:4)
Oh no. There needs to be a law keeping us from running out of "chemicals."
I hereby call on congress to mandate the conservation of mass, in case we run out.
Re:Subject goes here (Score:5, Funny)
No no, we could get all the phosphorus we need, now and forever, if we could just violate the law of conservation of mass! This is entirely a problem caused by bad legislation! We don't need more, we need congress to repeal the law of conservation of mass!
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I'm not sure this is a job for congress. I believe this is a problem that creationists should be working on. If they can pull this one off they will demonstrate their superiority over that satanical ideology called science.
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No need (Score:3)
We don't need to limit entropy, all we need to do is deny it exists, We can be Entropy Deniers. Works for Global Warming why not Entropy.
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Wouldn't be permitted. Lots of global warming deniers are also evolution deniers, and they cite what they think the Second Law means as proof.
Every utopian prediction (Score:2)
Every utopian prediction for the future from the most authoritarian to anarchist depends on humanity getting very good at recycling. Every new process that can get something valuable from *ahem* unsorted wastes is a step to a positive need-free future.
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Every utopian prediction for the future from the most authoritarian to anarchist depends on humanity getting very good at recycling. Every new process that can get something valuable from *ahem* unsorted wastes is a step to a positive need-free future.
That would be another case of learning from nature.
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Counterpoint: Nature doesn't actually assimilate steel girders in any useful way. We use nature for recycling, where nature is good at it. Animal waste for fertilizer, bacteria for waste-water treatment, but it's not some intelligent entity that's "better" at it than us.
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Opposite (Score:2)
Actually the dinosaurs achieved perfect recycling which is why you find only bones and no other artifacts. It turned out when nothing was permanent or well made, they all lost the will to live, and died of a deep malaise.
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but it's not some intelligent entity that's "better" at it than us
are you so afraid of religion that even science scares you? Over the course of billions of years, systems which fail will cease, and systems which work will succeed. A working system is/was present; saying we could be "learning from nature" means little more than being observant and realizing that many of our problems have already been solved in the system (aka Nature). Where the system has a solution which is too slow, or has a few ste
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That's not a very real view of nature.
Nature doesn't solve things, it is adjusted by things.
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Every utopian prediction for the future from the most authoritarian to anarchist depends on humanity getting very good at recycling. Every new process that can get something valuable from *ahem* unsorted wastes is a step to a positive need-free future.
That would be another case of learning from nature.
If you ask me, the OP hasn't learned anything. He used the phrase "need-free future" which pretty much put him somewhere on the intelligence scale between below average and creationist. Humans will always need yummy nitrogen-oxygen mixtures, food, fresh water, and social contact. Run out of any of those four basic things and what you get is either death, or something close to it. There's more things people would probably put into the 'needs' category, but the point here is that there is no such thing as a "
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If our previous 20,000 years of history is any indication, there is mostly no Internet or cars.
Such ideas are clearly silly, and limited only to nincompoops.
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If our previous 20,000 years of history is any indication, there's only one way it ends: With a lot of death. Whether it's due to plague, starvation, or war, eventually a large portion of the human race is going to die.
What part of that 20,000 years of "history" (including over 14,000 years of prehistory) actually indicates what you think it indicates? I don't see it myself.
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If you ask me, the OP hasn't learned anything. He used the phrase "need-free future" which pretty much put him somewhere on the intelligence scale between below average and creationist.
You see, I used a little benefit of doubt there. This caused me to assume that perhaps I'm not the only person here who's not a moron. Thus, his words read, to me, like he was talking about a viable future free of human-caused disasters. It didn't occur to me to think he was proposing humans would stop needing oxygen in the future or anything as silly as that, since he plainly made no such claim. In fact I question the security of someone who has to go to such lengths just to make him seem wrong and the
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I might just be cynical, but I never really saw that as fundamentally different that burning people, tossing their ashes into the ocean, and eating the fish that eat the algae that eat their body. It's all just matter at that point.
Eating people is only wrong on two factors.
#1 obvious human pathogen risk
#2 disrespect to those that cared about the deceased.
In the world of Soylent Green, no one cared about those that elected suicide, and they got processed by algae that ate their corpses, limiting the pathog
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Eating people is only wrong on two factors.
#3 it can lead to mutated-prion diseases?
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> #1 obvious human pathogen risk
While true, this is often overstated I think. This is true of any meat consumption really, especially if not well cooked. Even Kuru has CJD, similar disease from cow consumption. Any bacteria that can live in our flesh can likely live in theirs, and while many viruses are species specific, we have enough similarities for many to cross too.
> #2 disrespect to those that cared about the deceased.
Of course, there are those who don't feel this way. I even know one person who
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Of course, there are those who don't feel this way. I even know one person who actually expressed that his ideal send off would be for his friends and loved ones to cook and eat his flesh. So whether it is disrespect or respect is really in the eye of the beholder.
Was his name Valentine Michael Smith? And as noted in referenced book, the major christian religions partake in symbolic cannibalism regularly!
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#1
Yep, don't shag monkeys.
#2
Sounds like a rotten idea to me.
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> Yep, don't shag monkeys.
Or Great Apes for that matter.... which includes humans of course but.... safety first right?
> Sounds like a rotten idea to me.
No you need to cook the meat before it rots.
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don't bury me if I should die
I don't want my bones to lie
six feet under - six feet down
covered by unfeeling ground
please don't leave me here alone
with nothing but a cold, hard stone
a name, two dates and nothing more
don't leave me for the worms to gnaw
instead
peel off my useless skin
and expose the meat that lies within
ch
Re:Every utopian prediction (Score:4, Interesting)
" The Savage was reading Romeo and Juliet aloud–reading (for all the time he was seeing himself as Romeo and Lenina as Juliet) with an intense and quivering passion. Helmholtz had listened to the scene of the lovers' first meeting with a puzzled interest. The scene in the orchard had delighted him with its poetry; but the sentiments expressed had made him smile. Getting into such a state about having a girl–it seemed rather ridiculous. But, taken detail by verbal detail, what a superb piece of emotional engineering! "That old fellow," he said, "he makes our best propaganda technicians look absolutely silly." The Savage smiled triumphantly and resumed his reading. All went tolerably well until, in the last scene of the third act, Capulet and Lady Capulet began to bully Juliet to marry Paris. Helmholtz had been restless throughout the entire scene; but when, pathetically mimed by the Savage, Juliet cried out:
"Is there no pity sitting in the clouds, That sees into the bottom of my grief? O sweet my mother, cast me not away: Delay this marriage for a month, a week; Or, if you do not, make the bridal bed In that dim monument where Tybalt lies "
when Juliet said this, Helmholtz broke out in an explosion of uncontrollable guffawing.
The mother and father (grotesque obscenity) forcing the daughter to have some one she didn't want! And the idiotic girl not saying that she was having some one else whom (for the moment, at any rate) she preferred! In its smutty absurdity the situation was irresistibly comical. He had managed, with a heroic effort, to hold down the mounting pressure of his hilarity; but "sweet mother" (in the Savage's tremulous tone of anguish) and the reference to Tybalt lying dead, but evidently uncremated and wasting his phosphorus on a dim monument, were too much for him. He laughed and laughed till the tears streamed down his face–quenchlessly laughed while, pale with a sense of outrage, the Savage looked at him over the top of his book and then, as the laughter still continued, closed it indignantly, got up and, with the gesture of one who removes his pearl from before swine, locked it away in its drawer. "
-Brave New World
The recognition that running out of phosphorus is serious shit isn't even all that new.
Seems to be missing 90% percent of the problem. (Score:1)
So what about the gold mine in the supposedly massive dead zones in places like the Gulf of Mexico from agricultural run off? How can we reclaim that?
Fancy technology (Score:2)
But rapid-composting systems will render sewage into safe, non-smelly fertilizer in a year, provided you're not full of medications or using any fiendish chemicals. It'll get all the rest of the nutrients too. Really, all we need to do is replicate and rev up a natural system, and reclaim *all* the nutrients. There's a reason we aren't all drowning in dinosaur shit.
Seriously, a fancy jig to get just one nutrient back sounds like a money grab rather than a working whole system.
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Seriously, a fancy jig to get just one nutrient back sounds like a money grab rather than a working whole system.
Sure, in places with the geography to allow it, compost mountains would be a great way to process many types of waste. In completely new city construction, a subterranean compost layer might work wonderfully.
This is more about applying a quick refit to existing systems that have been generally successful for decades to improve things without having to do a complete overhaul.
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Sewage treatment plants are not the only application of the technology. In principle, if phosphorus can be recovered cheaply enough, it could be extracted from agricultural runoff before that runoff enters the ecosystem.
Re:Fancy technology (Score:5, Informative)
Assuming you don't fuck up the composting (not always a safe assumption, once the system moves into volume production and management by people who have to make budget) the stuff is largely pathogen free; but that doesn't do anything about anything that microorganisms that thrive on sewage don't help you with. Heavy metals, some drugs, some hormones(synthetic or not), some endocrine disruptors, any random plastics that end up down the sink, and so on. The concentrations aren't apocalyptic; but if you plan on routine use as fertilizer, better hope that they don't build up in the soil...
So called 'class B' sludge, where they don't even bother treating for pathogens, is of course even more fun than 'class A' where you only have to worry about anything that bacteria won't eat.
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There was a fairly interesting Radiolab podcast about a program that shipped New York City's biosolids to Colorado for use as fertilizer: http://www.radiolab.org/story/... [radiolab.org]
It includes a significant discussion of waste treatment, pathogens, and the economics of shipping what some municipalities call hazardous waste cross-country.
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(In one particularly, um, polarizin
That's some funny shit (Score:2)
Soylent Brown (Score:5, Funny)
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Sweet! (Score:2)
Well... er... not actually...
But it's a cool idea...
Re:Not scarce, no rare (Score:5, Informative)
In 2012, the USGS estimated 71 billion tons of world reserves, where reserve figures refer to the amount assumed recoverable at current market prices; 0.19 billion tons were mined in 2011.[23] Recent reports suggest that production of phosphorus may have peaked, leading to the possibility of global shortages by 2040.[24] In 2007, at the rate of consumption, the supply of phosphorus was estimated to run out in 345 years.[25] However, some scientists now believe that a "peak phosphorus" will occur in 30 years and that "At current rates, reserves will be depleted in the next 50 to 100 years."[26] Phosphorus comprises about 0.1% by mass of the average rock, and consequently the Earth's supply is vast, although dilute
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphorus#Occurrence [wikipedia.org].
"Peak phosphorus" sounds like "peak oil", but there does appear to be a number of people afraid of future scarcity. However, the ability to cheaply precipitate phosphorus out of sewage waste (and hopefully, with a few tweaks, out of agricultural runoff also), could significantly reduce dead zones [wikipedia.org], especially the Gulf of Mexico dead zone. That seems reason enough to pursue this.
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Common mineral. Common as dirt.
And yet, the primary industrial source of phosphorous is phosphate rock. Which has to mined. And of which we're running short.
Maybe you should consider that there's a reason for that?
Precious? (Score:2)
Gollum: We wants it, we needs it. Must have the precious phosphorous. They stole it from us.
General Jack D. Ripper: Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious phosphorous without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.
Are we harvesting our own poop for phosphorus? (Score:2)
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Ii goes to a treatment plant where it is treated. The remaining solids are then driven out into farm land and flung into fields.
So, yes, yes we're and have been for a long time.
because bird poop is better (Score:4, Interesting)
Originally, most phosphate production came from guano (basically petrified seabird poop). It was so strategically valuable, that the USA was allowing people to annex islands and exercise mining rights [wikipedia.org] with US military backing. The country of Nauru (aka Pleasant Island) once based their entire economy on it.
Of course, as with most things, we literally ate it all up (it's used to make fertilizer for plants) and now we rely on other sources. Then of course there are people that argue we have reached peak phosphorus [wikipedia.org] production of all possible sources...
What resource shall we queue up next in our sky-is-falling headline of-the-week?
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All of them, until we reach "peak human", which should be by 2050 according to current predictions.
An effective, lower-tech method (Score:3, Informative)
A community-scale pilot project by the Rich Earth Institute [richearthinstitute.org] is demonstrating a fairly low-tech and cost-effective way to reclaim two thirds of the phosphorus and 85% of the nitrogen from human waste: recycling urine (which is nearly sterile and can be further sanitized very easily) directly into fertilizer. (Yes, #1 really does have a lot more fertilizer value than #2!) It's also being done in various public projects in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and by lots of gardeners around the world. There's also this book [liquidgoldbook.com] that talks about the history of urine as an industrial feedstock and modern methods for using it as a fertilizer at large or small scale.
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A community-scale pilot project by the Rich Earth Institute [richearthinstitute.org] is demonstrating a fairly low-tech and cost-effective way to reclaim two thirds of the phosphorus and 85% of the nitrogen from human waste: recycling urine (which is nearly sterile and can be further sanitized very easily) directly into fertilizer. (Yes, #1 really does have a lot more fertilizer value than #2!) It's also being done in various public projects in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and by lots of gardeners around the world. There's also this book [liquidgoldbook.com] that talks about the history of urine as an industrial feedstock and modern methods for using it as a fertilizer at large or small scale.
The problem with this in the modern world is the vast amount of pharmaceuticals in your average modern human, of which, yes, a good amount is secreted in urine.
(warning: pdf) http://www.ecosan.at/ssp/issue... [ecosan.at]
Paging Dr. Obvious (Score:2)
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"So the crowned heads of science "
nice ad hom
"have just figured out that if there's a shortage of agricultural phosphorus and a surplus of it in sewage"
no. This isn't new.
"Why not just funnel the sewage, after primary treatment to break the disease transmission cycle, right onto our fields?"
many place do and have been for decades.
The problem is, you're an idiot who would rather make attacks, slander scientist and make shit up instead of thinking and take 5 minute to look something up.
Twit.
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~5m people, in the middle of a desert -- helping to draw down the colorado river, and they're growing cotton. =/ (and corn too for what it's worth.)
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