Bruce Rittmann was invited to present the keynote address in May of 2019 at the biennial conference of the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors, hosted by ASU. The title of his presentation was Exploring the Built Environment Dimension of Cities in 4-D: Capturing Value from What We Now Call Waste.
Abstract: While wastewater treatment has focused on removing water pollutants, many of the pollutants are valuable resources if recovered in a useful form. This presentation focuses on novel means to capture the energy value in “used waters,” including domestic wastewater. New developments in anaerobic membrane bioreactors (to generate methane) and microbial electrochemical cells (to generate electrical power or hydrogen gas) now make it feasible to achieve energy-positive treatment of the BOD. After recovery of the energy from used water, most of the N and P are released as inorganic forms that can be recovered for recycle to agriculture. Focusing on P, an important take-home lesson is that traditional techniques for “P removal” will not work for P recovery. Read more HERE.