Fate of Estrogens and Illicit Drugs During Urine Separation and Treatment

Hill Aerospace Museum, Conference Room

The presence and their subsequent treatment of nutrient in municipal wastewater is still at the front end of environmental engineering despite several decades of successful research and applications. In recent times, the source separation followed by the treatment of urine or resource recovery from human urine has evolved as emerging management strategies albeit mostly at research stage. Human contributes about 80% of the nitrogen, 70% of the potassium and up to 50% of the total although the urine only contributes 1% of the total volume of the wastewater. It is also a known fact that many of the micropollulatnts get into municipal wastewater through urine excretion. The information on the fate of micropollutants during urine treatment and resource recovery is scarce and this study will focus on this emerging area of research. This is one of few studies to evaluate the feasibility of simultaneous P recovery and N removal using combination of chemical and biological processes. The primary results showed above 95% P recovery via struvite precipitation. This study also investigated the possibility of using deammonificaiton processes in lab scale reactors feed with diluted urine after struvite precipitation. The serum bottles tests showed the deammonificaiton reactors performances were not affected by up to 100ug/L E2.