Energy-neutral sustainable nutrient recovery incorporated with the wastewater purification process in an enlarged microbial nutrient recovery cell

Recovery of nutrient resources from the wastewater is now an inevitable strategy to maintain the supply of both nutrient and water for our huge population. While the intensive energy consumption in conventional nutrient recovery technologies still remained as the bottleneck towards the sustainable nutrient recycle. This study proposed an enlarged microbial nutrient recovery cell (EMNRC) which was powered by the energy contained in wastewater and achieved multi-cycle nutrient recovery incorporated with in situ wastewater treatment. With the optimal recovery solution of 3 g/L NaCl and the optimal volume ratio of wastewater to recovery solution of 10:1, >89% of phosphorus and >62% of ammonium nitrogen were recovered into struvite. An extremely low water input ratio of <1% was required to obtain the recovered fertilizer and the purified water. It was proved the EMNRC system was a promising technology which could utilize the chemical energy contained in wastewater itself and energy-neutrally recover nutrient during the continuous wastewater purification process.