The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) was founded to support moonshot projects in the realm of energy, with a portfolio that ranges from the edge of current capabilities to some pretty far out stuff. We’re not sure exactly where their newest “Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO)” falls, but they’re looking for critical materials from the wastewater treatment process. [via CleanTechnica]
As a refresher, critical materials are those things that are bottlenecks in a supply chain that you don’t want to be sourcing from unfriendly regions. For the electrification of transportation and industrial processes required to lower carbon emissions, lithium, cobalt, and other rare earth elements are pretty high on the list.
ARPA-E also has an interest in ammonia-based products which is particularly interesting as industrial fertilizers can wreak havoc on natural ecosystems when they become run off instead of making it into the soil. As any farmer knows, inputs cost money, so finding an economical way to recover those products from wastewater would be a win-win. “For all categories, the final recovered products will need to include at least two targeted high energy-value materials, have greater than 90% recovery efficiency, and be commercially viable in the U.S. market.” If that sounds like the sort of thing you’d like to try hacking on, consider filling out an Applicant Profile.
If you’re curious about where we’re getting some of these materials from right now, checkout our series on Mining and Refining, including the lithium and cobalt ARPA-E wants more of.
My dog recovers energy materials from the cat’s litter box.
Then he gives everybody sloppy dog kisses.
Does he actually get energy? Asking for a friend, not because I have a dog who does the same…
That’ll be canceled by March.
Nope. The caveat “be commercially viable” is significant, quite distinct from many other initiatives…
Doesn’t matter. They’ll say it’s “woke”. Or Elon will say that the government is wasting money on sifting through poop or something similarly reductive and dishonest.
Or maybe the whole thing is about checking a box that says “Climate” or “Energy” on somebody’s budget requests and those who cancel it are right.
Weird place for a person who doesn’t believe in science to hang out but whatever.
Are you OK? There is help available if you’re having thoughts of self-harm.
Rather than letting businesses dump whatever they like in the public sewer and then asking underfunded public treatment facilities to separate it out again, why not put legislation in place requiring that businesses separate out the recyclable constituents before discharging their wastewater?
I know requiring businesses to take responsibility for their stuff is terribly old fashioned, but it works.
See: “commercially viable”. All regulations on production are a tax on the consumer. Funding research that will produce commercially viable recycling is totally within the remit of the state, but don’t fool yourself.
Environmental cleanup by government is a tax on the taxpayer.
The cost of cleaning up a company’s messes ought to be paid by the company’s customers, if not by the shareholders and management. Why should anyone else be held responsible for their irresponsibility?
If a Pratt and Whitney engine plant has a toxic spill into a river, why should I pay, rather than Boeing etc?
Do you want your iPhone or not?
The iPhone wastewaters do not touch any part of US soil unless the few engineers in California poop gold…
I think the idea here is that this isn’t necessarily business dumping, it could be materials in people’s pharmaceuticals or whatever.
From 2015:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/mar/23/gold-in-faeces-worth-millions-save-environment#:~:text=Sewage%20sludge%20contains%20traces%20of,of%20the%20US%20Geological%20Survey.
“A previous study, by Arizona State University, estimated that a city of 1 million inhabitants flushed about $13m (£8.7m) worth of precious metals down toilets and sewer drains each year.”
“Precious metals are increasingly used in everyday products, such as shampoos, detergents and even clothes, where nanoparticles are sometimes used to limit body odour. Waste containing these metals all ends up being funnelled through sewage treatment plants, where many metals end up in the leftover solid waste. “There are metals everywhere,” Smith noted.”
Are you talking about Mexico or China? In the USA one does not dump whatever one likes in the sewers – legally. In most of the World people just dump in rivers or storm drains. The project smacks of virtue signalling.
Two words: Peak phosphorus.
I’m surprised there hasn’t been more efforts to extract minerals from seawater. It is a virtual soup of the stuff. I know there were successful efforts in German in the 1930’s, but they were deemed not “commercially viable”.
“Germany”, also. Damn you for not having an “edit” function. Don’t you know coffee takes time to work!?
As desalination increases in the future there will be more incentives to process the resulting brine.
It seems a little silly to try grabbing e.g. lithium out of wastewater when we have solid waste streams that have it literally by the ton. Every landfill should have automated scavenging that shreds open bags and pulls out recyclables and e-waste.
This is one of those biblical pull the log out before looking for the splinter situations.
I mean, it wouldn’t be the first time we found that mining the landfill was a better investment than mining the mountains.
First things first, where do i send my waste?