BAM Video no 66, 2009, 12:10 min, FLV, 20 MB
EU Project SUSAN – Sustainable and Safe Re-use of Municipal Sewage Sludge for Nutrient Recovery – a research project within the 6th Framework Programme of the EU with an overall budget of about 1.6 million Euro (EU support: about 1.2 million Euro). Project life span: November 2005 to December 2008.
The agricultural use of sewage sludge is highly dubious due to the sometimes high level of pollutants and it will be sharply reduced in the future. This means that sewage sludge must be increasingly fed into utilisation schemes where the nutrients, in particular phosphorus, are recovered.
Recycling of phosphorus is both ecologically and economically reasonable and contributes to a saving of these limited resources.
The EU project SUSAN followed the strategy that sewage sludge is treated in mono-incinerators (plant incinerating sewage sludge only) and the resulting sewage sludge ash is processed into a marketable phosphorus-rich fertiliser. Monoincineration destroys the organic contaminants. Heavy metals contained in the sewage sludge are subsequently removed by a thermochemical process where phyto availability of the contained phosphates is increased up to 100 %. In addition to the technical development of the thermochemical method, product efficiency, product design and sustainability of the entire process were emphasized.
BAM coordinated the SUSAN project and carried out the necessary thermochemical and analytical research in the laboratory and in small-scale experiments. The project partners were: ASHDEC Umwelt AG, SNB NV Slibverwerking Noord-Brabant, BAMAG Ltd., KEMIRA GrowHow Oyi, Institute for Plant Nutrition and Soil Science of FAL Braunschweig and Institute for Water Quality, Resource Management and Waste Management (IWA) of Vienna Technical University.
Contact
BAM Federal Institute for
Materials Research and Testing
Project SUSAN
www.susan.bam.de
Division 4.3
Waste Treatment and
Remedial Engineering