Recovery of market-valuable products from wastewater? Believe it!

Paige Novak is part of a team that has been selected to receive funding from Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) as part of the RECOVER program. The project, led by George Wells (Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University), is titled Nitrogen and Phosphorus Recovery via Intensified Microbial Extraction (N-PRIME): A Biotechnological Approach for Valorization of Municipal Wastewater. The research focuses on the use of microbes to selectively concentrate nitrogen and phosphorus in wastewater by three orders of magnitude, enabling the recovery of these nutrients as market-valuable products. This technology, called N-PRIME, seeks to enable continuous recovery of high value amino acids and fertilizer at greater productivity and lower cost than state of the art methods. The technology would be used to decrease imports of phosphate and ammonia, as well as improve the resilience, reliability, and security of the supply chain by onshoring nutrient production via a scalable and low-energy approach directly adaptable to existing wastewater treatment infrastructure.

The project is funded in the amount of $2,718,183 by ARPA-E, a wing of the United States Department of Energy (DOE) that describes itself as a “united community of daring scientists, entrepreneurs, and industry experts who collaborate across the full energy ecosystem.”