The goal of the Run4Life project is to recover nutrients from domestic waste streams for application in agriculture.
Domestic wastewater is an important carrier of resources, among which are water and nutrients. In the current centralised wastewater management systems nutrients are hardly recovered. Run4Life proposes an alternative strategy for improving nutrient recovery rates, based on a decentralised treatment of segregated black water (toilet wastewater), grey water (other domestic wastewaters) and organic kitchen waste. Different innovative technologies are combined, such as new ultra-low water flushing vacuum toilets yielding highly concentrated black water, hyper-thermophilic anaerobic digestion as one-step process for fertilisers production and bio-electrochemical systems for nitrogen recovery.
The technologies and will be demonstrated at 4 large sites in Europe, the first time nutrients will be recovered from domestic waste streams at this scale. The resulting fertiliser products will be characterised and their possibilities for agricultural application will be determined. End users and other stakeholders are afundamental part of this evaluation.
The project started in June 2017 and will continue until June 2021.