REACTIVE INNOVATIONS, LLC — Department of Agriculture SBIR Phase I: 8.4

Description

In this Phase I SBIR program, Reactive Innovations, LLC (RIL) will demonstrate an advanced system to recover valuable nutrients from animal manure. Since World War II, the availability of relatively cheap mineral fertilizers has been a major factor spurring specialization of production agriculture, in which crop (cereal) production has been increasingly separated from livestock production. One important consequence of this has been the stranding of large amounts of nutrients in livestock manures that originated from cereal production, but which are not recycled back to the source for the next production cycle. Equally large amounts of nutrients from cereal production are also stranded within the human food chain, and frequently dumped into landfills as waste. In the longer term, these are not sustainable practices.In many parts of the world, phosphorus is considered a non-renewable resource, with current supplies of high quality phosphates likely to become limiting within the next 25 years. This is partially a result of increasing environmental issues linked to phosphate mining (water table protection and fluoride byproducts) which may limit accessibility to deposits, resulting in greater instability in phosphate fertilizer costs. Likewise, the cost of producing synthetic nitrogen fertilizers from atmospheric sources is continually increasing because of the dependence on natural gas, while also having its own environmental impacts (high energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions). Both of these issues result in increasing the demand and value of livestock manure nutrients.Our approach to recovering nutrients from manure is based on an environmentally benign dual-oxidant concept.The goal of the Phase I program is to demonstrate the technology using a proof-of-concept bench scale prototype. Our concept has commercial potential in both water treatment and agricultural applications. As the main goal of the proposed work, we will develop a system to recover phosphates from a slurry of manure (black water), which has great environmental implications in restoring agricultural nutrient balance. The recovered product has commercial value, as the phosphate is one of the few molluscicides approved for use in the practice of organic farming.