Environmental and Economic Sustainability of Swine Wastewater Treatments Using Ammonia Stripping and Anaerobic Digestion: A Short Review

Adele Folino, Demetrio Antonio Zema and Paolo S. Calabrò
Additional contact information
Adele Folino: Department Agraria, Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria, Località Feo di Vito, I-89122 Reggio Calabria, Italy
Demetrio Antonio Zema: Department Agraria, Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria, Località Feo di Vito, I-89122 Reggio Calabria, Italy
Paolo S. Calabrò: Department Diceam, Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria, Via Graziella, Località Feo di Vito, I-89124 Reggio Calabria, Italy

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 12, 1-28

Abstract: One of the most promising systems to treat swine wastewater is air stripping. This system simultaneously recovers nitrogen salts, to be used as fertiliser, and reduces the organic pollutant load in the effluents of swine breeding farms. Several reviews have discussed the air stripping as a treatment for many types of industrial wastewater or nitrogen-rich digestate (the liquid effluent derived from the anaerobic digestion plants) for the stripping/recovery of nutrients. However, reviews about the use of air stripping as treatment for raw or anaerobically digested swine wastewater are not available in literature. To fill this gap, this study: (i) Summarises the experiences of air stripping for recovery of ammonium salts from both raw and digested swine wastewater; and (ii) compares air stripping efficiency under different operational conditions. Moreover, combined systems including air stripping (such as struvite crystallisation, chemical precipitation, microwave radiation) have been compared. These comparisons have shown that air stripping of raw and digested swine wastewater fits well the concept of bio-refinery, because this system allows the sustainable management of the piggery effluent by extracting value-added compounds, by-products, and/or energy from wastewater. On the other hand, air stripping of raw and digested swine wastewater has not been extensively studied and more investigations should be carried out.

Keywords: air stripping; ammonia removal efficiency; ammonium sulphate; digestate; nitrogen recovery; process conditions; struvite (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/12/4971/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/12/4971/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:12:p:4971-:d:373156

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().