Be honest: if you were asked, on the spur of the moment, to put together a list of resources that are essential for our life on Earth, would you have added phosphorus? Probably not. And yet phosphorus plays a vital role when it comes to biological growth and energy metabolism. Indeed, it is true to say: no phosphorus – no life. Which makes it all the more problematic that resources of this vital substance are becoming scarce on our planet. What's more, the global resources that we do have are found in just a few countries. Practically all of Europe's phosphorus must be imported and the quality of the raw material is gradually deteriorating as it contains an ever growing amount of pollutants. Innovative processes must be developed, therefore, to recover and recycle phosphorus to reduce our dependency on imports. REMONDIS has been working on this for many years now.
Phosphorus is a vital nutrient for all living organisms and is essential for their growth
Phosphorus is found as phosphate in sewage sludge, the residual material left over from wastewater treatment. Up until just recently, farmers had spread this sewage sludge on their fields as a fertiliser to make the very most of its valuable contents. New quality standards, however, have now been introduced that mean this is no longer possible as the sewage sludge not only contains valuable phosphate but also harmful heavy metals and organic pollutants which are also released into the soil. A solution is needed, therefore, that enables the phosphorus to be removed from the sewage sludge with as few of the harmful by-products as possible. We have found this solution – with our patented REMONDIS TetraPhos® process. Here, the sewage sludge is thermally treated to produce ash. This is then mixed with phosphoric acid which is enriched with the phosphate in the ash. The phosphoric acid produced by this process does not contain any heavy metals at all and is of a higher quality than the raw material from natural resources. There are no restrictions as to how it may be used by industrial businesses – it is ideal, for example, for producing fertiliser and corrosion inhibitors.
REMONDIS’ TetraPhos process won the 2016 Green Tec Award – find out more in the section on Awards
Following the successful completion of the pilot phase, the world’s first ever industrial-scale phosphorus recovery plant was commissioned in Hamburg in 2020. Each year, this facility can produce 7,000 tonnes of ultra-pure phosphoric acid from 20,000 tonnes of sewage sludge ash. And this is just the beginning – there is a huge potential across the country for recovering phosphorus. And this is also important for preventing climate change. If all the volumes of sewage sludge produced in Germany each year were to undergo the TetraPhos® process, then this would have the same effect on reducing CO2 levels as 27 million trees. Why? Because the environmental footprint of REPACID®, the phosphoric acid produced by the TetraPhos® process, is 60% better than that of the virgin raw material that has to be imported.
The TetraPhos® process truly is recycling at its best. It is like a puzzle piece that fits perfectly into the chain of wastewater treatment, thermal treatment and phosphorus recovery. A sustainable system that fully closes the material life cycle of phosphorus for the very first time. But that’s not all: TetraPhos® does even more. Besides producing the phosphoric acid REPACID®, which is of a much higher quality than the natural raw material, it also generates gypsum from the ash, which can be used by the building supplies trade, as well as iron and aluminium salts. The latter can be used, for example, as a precipitating agent to treat wastewater.
We had developed some other successful systems for recovering phosphorus before we broke new ground with our TetraPhos® process. The so-called REPHOS system was developed by our company to clean industrial wastewater and remove phosphorus straight from the water as magnesium-ammonium-phosphate (MAP). We were one of the first companies worldwide to see wastewater not as a matter of waste management but as a valuable source of raw materials. Indeed, you could say that we were carrying out aquatic mining long before the term even existed. And we continue to see ourselves as pioneers in this field. Aquatic mining still has so much potential. We are bound to come up with our next innovation soon.
We also process phosphorus into struvite
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