There is increasing recognition of the need to approach water/wastewater research from a systems-level perspective. Accordingly, a major area of emphasis in the United States is Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy, and Water Systems (also known as INFEWS). From this perspective, wastewater treatment offers an opportunity for co-recovery of resources, rather than systems designed solely to remove nuisance pollutants.

As population and energy demands continue to increase, anaerobic wastewater treatment may play a more prominent role in treatment strategies, but downstream treatment to remove micropollutants and recover nutrients may be necessary.

This research project focuses on developing innovative applications for recovering nutrients and removing micropollutants from domestic wastewater.

This work is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation's I/UCRC Water Equipment and Policy (WEP) Center (PI-McNamara, Co-PI Mayer) and a grant from the Lafferty Family Foundation (PIs Mayer and McNamara).

This work is being performed in collaboration with Patrick McNamara (Marquette University, Environmental Engineering), and students involved include Yiran Tong.

RELATED GROUP PUBLICATIONS

Carey, D.E., Yang, Y., McNamara, P.J., Mayer, B.K. 2016. Recovery of agricultural nutrients from biorefineries. Bioresource Tech. In Press, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biortech.2016.02.093.

Williams, A.T., Zitomer, D.H., Mayer, B.K. 2015. Ion exchange-precipitation for nutrient recovery from dilute wastewaters. Env. Sci.: Water Res. Technol. 1:832-838.

Mayer, B.K., Gerrity, D., Rittmann, B.E., Reisinger, D., Brandt-Williams, S. 2013. Innovative strategies to achieve low total phosphorus concentrations in high water flows. Crit. Rev. Environ. Sci. Tech. 43:4:409-441.

Rittmann, B.E., Mayer, B.K., Westerhoff, P., Edwards, M. 2011. Capturing the lost phosphorus. Chemosphere.84:846-853. .

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