Abstract

Recycling of the plant nutrients in sewage to productive land is a long-term goal set up by the Swedish society. In particular, recycling of phosphorus is considered important. To highlight recycling system from an agricultural perspective, a doctoral project was initiated with the objective to analyse environmental and resource aspects for system recycling wastewater nutrients to agriculture and to discuss how recycling system could be designed to fulfill specified environmental requirements. Three scenario studies were performed and are briefly described in this paper. When the recycling system were analysed from an agricultural perspective, factors influencing the fertilising value were stressed, as well as potential hindrance to optimal use. The studies revealed that the potential to replace mineral fertilisers is an important aspect, and this depends on several factors such as available spreading equipment, the actual need for plant nutrients and plant availability of the nutrients. The amount of replaced mineral fertiliser is therefore a better indicator than how much that is recycled. Suitable methods for weighting the use of different non-renewable resources need to be developed, in particular for systems recycling phosphorus at the expense of an increased energy use. How depletion of sulphur should be considered also needs to be analysed

Published in

Vatten
2006, Volume: 62, number: 1, pages: 77-82

SLU Authors

• Tidåker, Pernilla

  • Department of Energy and Technology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

• Jönsson, Håkan

  • Department of Energy and Technology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

UKÄ Subject classification

Fish and Aquacultural Science
Environmental Sciences related to Agriculture and Land-use
Economics and Business


Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/9906