Concentrated Phosphorus Recovery from Food Grade Animal Bones

Edward Someus and Massimo Pugliese
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Edward Someus: Terra Humana Ltd., Biofarm Agri Research Station, Kajászó H-2472, Hungary
Massimo Pugliese: Università Degli Studi di Torino, Agroinnova and DISAFA, Grugliasco (TO) 10095, Italy

Sustainability, 2018, vol. 10, issue 7, 1-17

Abstract: Disrupted nutrient recycling is a significant problem for Europe, while phosphorus and nitrogen are wasted instead of being used for plant nutrition. Mineral phosphate is a critical raw material, which may contain environmentally hazardous elements such as cadmium and uranium. Therefore, phosphorus recovery from agricultural and food industrial by-product streams is a critically important key priority. Phosphorus recovery from food grade animal bone by-products have been researched since 2002 and a specific zero emission autothermal carbonization system, called 3R, has been developed in economical industrial scale, providing the animal bone char product (ABC) as output. Different animal bone by-products were tested under different conditions at 400 kg/h throughput capacity in the continuously operated 3R system. Different material core treatment temperatures (between >300 °C and <850 °C) were combined with different residence times under industrial productive processing conditions. It was demonstrated that material core treatment temperature <850 °C with 20 min residence time is necessary to achieve high quality ABC with useful agronomic value. The output ABC product has concentrated >30% phosphorus pentoxide (P 2 O 5 ), making it a high quality innovative fertilizer.

Keywords: bio-phosphate; ABC Animal-Bone-Char; 3R pyrolysis; phosphorus recovery; animal by-products; apatite (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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