Industrial Wastewater Circularity: Innovative Approaches to Bioelectrochemical Nutrient Recovery
One of the main focus of environmental engineering in the XX century was the removal of pollutants from urban/industrial wastewater. Within the new paradigm of the circular economy, the objective is to treat wastes as resources and recover as much as possible from wastewater. Industrial wastewater typically contains many valuable compounds that shouldn’t be wasted. The benefits of recovering nutrients from wastewater are double: it will avoid their release into water bodies, which can affect the quality of freshwater and marine water, and it will provide the industry with a valuable resource that can be used to produce chemical products with market value.
Innovative approaches are being developed for the chemical industry. Among the different existing technologies, bioelectrochemical systems, (BESs) are innovative devices that involve microbes able to interchange electrons with a solid electrode to convert organic matter into valuable chemicals. By utilizing natural biological processes, BESs offer a clean and potentially transformative technology for the future. The VIVALDI workshop “Industrial Wastewater Circularity: Innovative Approaches to Bioelectrochemical Nutrient Recovery” will analyse different approaches to recover 3 different nutrients that share a common fundamental feature: bioelectrochemical systems.
- Dr. Albert Guisasola will present the three-chamber solution developed in the VIVALDI project to recover ammonium from high N-strength industrial wastewater as ammonium sulfate.
- Dr. Pau Bosch will showcase bioelectrochemical reactor to remove, recover and concentrate anions and cations from wastewater obtaining ions-concentrated streams.
- Dr. Annemiek ter Heijne will explain how electrodes can be used to harvest electrons from sulphide-oxidizing bacteria, leading to the recovery of elemental sulfur.
The lectures will be technical and addressed to an audience that is familiar with biological systems and electrochemistry.
Join the webinar on the 16th of May, from 10-11:30 am, by registering here.
