Our next PhDTalks Seminar will be held on Tuesday 17^th october in Fassò Room (Building 4A), from 5:15 pm to 6:30 pm CET. 

PhDTalks is a series of seminars and discussions between PhD students. The events are aimed at providing a place to network and get in contact with many of the projects developed in our department. 

Speaker Gaia Boniardi will talk about “Why should we recover P from sewage sludge? How can we get it?”. 

At the end of each event a small refreshment funded by the department will be available. 

You can watch the event online by clicking here. 

Abstract  

Phosphorus is an essential element for life and its supply is expected to be critical soon. The increasing demand for fertilizers is gradually depleting the phosphate rocks, which are non-renewable resources concentrated in a few countries. On the other hand, the population growth and the rapid urbanization are putting the wastewater treatment plants under strong pressure, who are dealing with huge amounts of sewage sludge to dispose of every year. To tackle this issue, in the view of circular economy and sustainable development, phosphorus and nutrient recovery from sewage sludge is a promising option. The goal of this research is to optimize the phosphorous recovery from sewage sludge ash via wet chemical extraction. Experimental results underlined the influence of wastewater treatment layout and combustion process conditions on phosphorus extraction, while the heavy metals decontamination played a fundamental role in the production of high-quality recovered material. 

Speaker’s bio 

Gaia is a PhD Candidate in Environmental and Infrastructure Engineering (36° cycle) at Politecnico di Milano. In 2020 she got a Master of Science in Environmental Engineering, and she is currently working on nutrient recovery from waste, in particular phosphorus from sewage sludge ash. In her free time, she loves swimming, surfing, and traveling.