Research
Developing, Demonstrating, and Assessing Innovative Technologies for Safe, Contextually-Appropriate Resource Recovery
Our research group develops innovative, safe, context-specific, and culturally-appropriate resource recovery technologies that improve water quality. These technologies can recover resources such as nutrients, energy, and water from multiple organic waste streams to promote food security and energy production. Additionally, we develop decision-making frameworks that engineers and development practitioners can use to integrate all the pillars of sustainability. These resource recovery technologies and decision-making frameworks can increase sanitation coverage and reduce contaminants entering the environment while simultaneously providing additional nutrients, energy, and water for communities.
To learn more:
- Environmental and economic impacts of nutrient recovery from digestate. Environmental Science & Technology.
- Impact of operating conditions on accelerating urea hydrolysis. Journal of Environmental Protection.
- Assessment of nutrient fluxes and recovery for a small-scale agricultural waste treatment system in Costa Rica. Journal of Environmental Management.
- Improving life cycle economic and environmental sustainability of animal manure management in marginalized farming communities through resource recovery. Environmental Engineering Science.
Integrating Social Context, Health Risk, and Policy into Wastewater Treatment and Resource Recovery at the Building, Community, and City Scales
Our research group develops technologies and frameworks that integrate social context, health risk, and policy alongside more traditional considerations of cost and discharge requirements of treating wastewater and recovering resourcesat multiple scales. Predicting and optimizing resource recovery while reducing health risk and unwanted nutrients and pathogens can increase opportunities to safely and efficiently recover nutrients, energy, and water.
To learn more:
- A framework for informing context-sensitive sustainable management of organic waste in rural agricultural regions. Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability.
- Fertilizer demand and potential supply through nutrient recovery from organic waste digestate in California. Water Research
- Holistically managing pathogens and nutrients in urbanizing tropical towns: Can sanitation technologies create safer conditions for beach recreation? ES&T Water
- Case study for analyzing nutrient-management technologies at three scales within a sewershed. Urban Water Journal
Utilizing Data Science to Leverage Resource Recovery and Carbon Capture
Our research group utilizes data science to improve monitoring, evaluation, and performance of wastewater treatment, resource recovery, organic waste management, and carbon capture. Opportunities exist to integrate data from apps, sensors, and participatory community analysis. Likewise, analyzing data using machine learning can translate to improved performance at different scales (building, community, city) with different waste inputs (wastewater, animal manure, food waste) in different contexts (rural and urban, developed and developing) and inform real-time decisions to maintain desired levels of treatment.
To learn more:
- A data-driven framework to inform sustainable management of animal manure in rural agricultural regions using emerging resource recovery technologies. Cleaner Environmental Systems.
- A critical literature review of data science applications in resource recovery and carbon capture from organic waste. ES&T Engineering