In 2021, Bioferes was born, a pioneering industrial research project led by Facsa, in cooperation with Biovic and the engineering firm INDEREN, whose main objective was to obtain agricultural products in a renewable way from sludge from Wastewater Treatment Plants (WWTPs), reducing the consumption of raw materials and the carbon footprint of the environment.
After two years of hard work, the project has been successfully completed, developing a novel biorefinery concept that will bring the wastewater management model closer to the principles of sustainability and circular economy.
To achieve this, the project team has relied on the help of the AINIA technology center and the ISIRYM institute of the Polytechnic University of Valencia for the specific laboratory tasks, as well as the collaboration of the Public Entity for Wastewater Sanitation of the Valencian Community (EPSAR), which has allowed the installation of the pilot plant in its facilities of the Alcoy WWTP (Alicante).
In the project, subsidized by the Valencian Innovation Agency (AVI), different technologies have been combined such as two-phase temperature anaerobic digestion, membrane technologies such as ultrafiltration and membrane contactors and solid-state fermentation reactors to obtain different streams and products with high value for agriculture: liquid biofertilizers with high nutrient content and solid biostimulants to promote crop growth.
In this regard, the major challenge has been to simultaneously achieve nutrient recovery and biogas production through co-digestion. The team at Bioferes This technology has been used to jointly treat different organic wastes, mainly agri-food, along with WWTP sludge to simultaneously obtain a final digested sludge with a high nutrient content (between 50% and 800% higher than WWTP sludge) and a high biogas production, up to three times the production compared to a conventional case.
As part of this biorefinery system, the use of membrane technologies has been studied for the recovery of nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) contained in digested sludge as liquid biofertilizers or ammonium salts, as well as solid-state fermentation with bioaugmentation to obtain a solid biostimulant, both capable of reducing and partially replacing the consumption of conventional fertilizers from non-renewable sources.
In short, Bioferes, in addition to promoting the sustainable treatment of wastewater treatment plant sludge, contributes to promoting a circular economy management model in the environment of wastewater treatment plants, to valorize and give a second life to waste, minimizing the cost and impact of its management.
