Phosphorus and nutrient management

Phosphorus is a finite, non-renewable mineral that underpins the fertilizers feeding roughly half the world's population, yet most of it flows through agriculture and urban systems into waterways, where it drives algal blooms before being lost entirely. Recovering phosphorus from wastewater—through processes like struvite crystallization, adsorption onto engineered materials, and biochar treatment—offers a way to close that loop, transforming a pollutant into a resource that can re-enter the food supply chain as fertilizer. Researchers are actively working to improve the efficiency and scalability of these recovery technologies, reduce their energy and chemical costs, and understand how recovered products behave agronomically compared to mined phosphate rock. A central open question is how to design integrated urban and industrial systems that treat phosphorus not as waste to be disposed of, but as a critical material to be continuously cycled.

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55,629

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735,657

Keywords

PhosphorusRecoveryWastewaterFertilizerStruviteAdsorption