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Phosphate Removal and Recovery using Drinking Water Plant Waste Residuals
Citation:
Nadagouda, M. AND E. Martin. Phosphate Removal and Recovery using Drinking Water Plant Waste Residuals. ACS Meeting, Covington, KY, May 18 - 21, 2016.
Impact/Purpose:
Resource Recovery and Reuse
Description:
Water treatment plants are used to provide safe drinking water. In parallel, however, they also produce a wide variety of waste products which, in principle, could be possible candidates as resources for different applications. Calcium carbonate is one of such residual waste in drinking water treatment plants, that can be employed to recover excess phosphorus in wastewaters, which is regarded as pollutant leading to eutrophication and algal blooms in waterways and coastal zones. Phosphates adsorbed on calcium carbonate are environmentally friendly, can be applied to agricultural fields as a fertilizer without requiring such as desorption. In this study, we collected disposed calcium carbonate residuals from a drinking water treatment plant and used it as an adsorbent for phosphate removal and recovery from wastewater. The adsorption behavior of phosphate on calcium carbonate was investigated via a series of batch experiments under varying contact time. The phosphate adsorption kinetics onto calcium carbonate was studied at various loading rate of the adsorbent (0.1-2g) up to 5 days. Adsorption capacities were calculated and were fitted to various adsorption isotherm models to gain more insights into the adsorption mechanism, where Freundlich model was noted to fit the data to the best correlation.
