- High-rate aerobic treatment with AD and anammox
- Integrated agro industrial wastewater treatment and nutrient recovery
- Nutrient recovery from paunch and DAF sludge (struvite)
- NGERS and wastewater management – mapping waste streams and quantifying the impacts.
- Review and evaluation of the application of anaerobic ammonium removal technology for wastewater treatment
- Feasibility study into the application of anaerobic ammonium removal technology for wastewater treatment at red meat processing plants
- Robust membrane systems for enhanced primary treatment and energy recovery of processing wastewater
Previous AMPC funded research demonstrated that processing plant wastewater has a relatively high ratio of organics to nitrogen, and a very high biodegradability, which led to the application of traditional waste treatment technologies such as covered anaerobic lagoons and conventional biological nutrient removal processes. While effective, these conventional technologies can leave large footprints and are not suitable for all red meat processors.
Purple Phototrophic Bacteria (PPB) is an emerging technology that enables the treatment of wastewater streams while producing potentially valuable feed or feed additives. In this technology, the removal of organics, nitrogen and phosphorus from wastewater occurs anaerobically in the presence of infra-red (IR) irradiation. Nutrients and organics are assimilated and/or accumulated by the PPB, which convert soluble compounds into a harvestable biomass with high protein content.
This project found that PPB production from red meat processing wastewater was successfully achieved using both attached growth modes and suspended growth modes. Attached growth resulted in a relatively consistent PPB product with high protein content (approximately 65 per cent) while suspended growth resulted in more variable PPB product quality between 30 per cent and 70 per cent crude protein.