July 13, 2012
Keywords: Environmental Technology Local government Manufacturing industry Reduce / Reuse / Recycle
Kobe, a major city in central Japan, announced on March 30, 2012, that its project to recover phosphorus for use in fertilizer was awarded a grant by the Japanese government for its 2012 Breakthrough by Dynamic Approach in Sewage High Technology Project (B-DASH). Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism is sponsoring the B-DASH Project to promote development of innovative technologies in wastewater treatment. Dubbed the "Kobe Harvest Project," the project in Kobe is a collaboration between Kobe City; water treatment and environmental engineering specialist Swing Corporation, and fertilizer company Mitsubishi Shoji Agri-Service Corporation.
The project, scheduled to start at the Higashinada Plant in Kobe in January 2013, aims to demonstrate a technology that can effectively recover sewage phosphate from municipal wastewater for reuse in agricultural fertilizer. The technology under development uses magnesium to easily separate phosphorus from digested sludge.
In some of Japan's enclosed bodies of water such as Osaka Bay and the Seto Inland Sea, phosphates cause harmful algal blooms, or "red tides." These phosphates need to be removed from sewage effluent to prevent the degradation of water quality associated with red tides. Meanwhile, while many Japanese farmers use phosphate for fertilizer in Japan, they are entirely dependent on imports as their source.
With global concern growing over the depletion of phosphate deposits, Kobe hopes to find an effective way to recover phosphate from wastewater and use it as a high-quality fertilizer.
Posted: 2012/07/13 06:00:15 AM