Sustainable nutrient cycling of nitrogenous and phosphate wastes for aquatic ecosystem restoration and nourishment

The SUSTAIN-R proposal aims to introduce innovative approaches (tools, methodologies and devices) for the restoration of aquatic systems with nutrient cycling and reuse of excess and legacy N and P nutrients, preventing, minimising and remediating aquatic systems and fostering associated ecosystem services.

Different anthropogenic pressures from human activities including agricultural excess nutrients, waste water treatment plants, livestock etc. results in nutrient pollution and primarily produce nitrogenous and phosphate wastes.

For evolving these concepts and methodologies in a controlled environment, Recirculation Aquaculture Systems (RAS) has been chosen to serve as a test-bench for proof-of-concept demonstration as RAS tail water includes nitrogenous and phosphate waste that will be recovered by capacitive deionization (CDI) as a resource for re-use as fertilizers or as precursors.

Nitrogenous matter will also be used for decentralized ammonia production for energy generation using electrocapacitive devices.

In parallel, a pilot plant of a sequential batch reactor (SBR) that will allow working under anoxic and aerobic conditions with timed cycles for simultaneous removal of nitrogen and phosphorus from wastewater will also be tested.

This project involves academic partners namely KTH (Sweden) Aarhus University (Denmark), Thessaloniki University (Greece) and Aeris, an SME in Spain.