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Sewage to Fertilizer from Canadian Technology
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Feature
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A University of British Columbia Professor and Civil Engineer Don Mavinic has co-invented a potentially breakthrough technology. It may help to answer a world-wide need for phosphorus used in so many domestic fertilizers and farm products. Phosphorus is in high demand and shortages are significant enough to hinder food production and increase cost. In fact China is so concerned with it that they've put a 1.35 export tariff on it. The standard way to get phosphorus is phosphate mining which is expensive and it is a resource that is highly sought after by nations. It so happens that humans are great phosphorus making machines. We excrete 3.3 million US tons of it yearly. For years Milwaukee Wisconsin has produced a product called Millorganite (see the video) that comes out of the sewage treatment plant. This has produced standard home fertilizer for years. Many gardeners use it. It's a big and expensive project, but it is shipped all over the US and Canada and helps defray the cost of water purity returned to Lake Michigan This type of system is very large, requires a big base of operations and is supported by the community. Sometimes new technologies come along that show promise and have enough return on investment that they do change the way we do things. Many municipalities in Ontario have sewage treatment plants and more are planned to reduce the potential danger to humans. They process normal human waste via existing sewer systems and also pump outs of septic systems. They are part of the community services, like roads and Police Services. The idea is to not just add a cost to the process, but to make it pay back over a reasonable time period.
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The new technology has been created by Ostara of Vancouver BC. It takes human waste and makes phosphorus pellets that can be used in any number of industrial and agricultural products. The technology is scaled so that smaller towns can use it and achieve a 5-year payback. A recent article in Scientific American lauded the new process and engineering that has quietly taken shape in Vancouver. It is rapidly gaining customers and here is what it does in summary: Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies Inc. is a Vancouver-based company founded in 2005 to develop and commercialize proprietary technologies that recover nutrients from liquid sewage and recycle them into environmentally-friendly slow release fertilizer, called Crystal Green®. |
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