Reclaiming Waste Phosphorus from Industrial Drug Manufacturing Systems

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Emergent Biosolutions is a biopharmaceutical company that operates a major facility in Winnipeg, Manitoba, as well as others across Canada and the United States. The Winnipeg facility produces hyperimmunes and specific biopharmaceuticals which they market in Canada and export. During the normal production process, phosphorus (P) is discharged to the city sewer system in short durations, but at high concentrations. As part of a new effort to reduce phosphorus entering the sewer system, the company was asked to reduce total P release by the City of Winnipeg. Standard wastewater methods to remove excess phosphorus involve additions of metal salts to flocculate phosphorus into a metal/phosphate sludge, which is disposed at a landfill site. However, since this practice converts one waste stream into another, it is not a sustainable solution, wasting a potentially valuable nutrient and increasing overall operational costs without increasing benefit for the company or greater society. Currently, the phosphorus released by the facility is high in concentration, uncontaminated by organic solids or metals, providing a good potential feed stream for producing struvite, a slow-release fertilizer with niche agricultural and ecological applications. Ideally, the facility would adapt and combine other "in house" waste streams to supply the additional components to produce struvite, namely magnesium, ammonium and the alkali needed for pH adjustment. The challenge for Emergent is to identify and adapt these waste streams within their facility and then to produce and market this new struvite product. The proposed research project endeavours to process and combine existing waste streams in the Emergent facility to precipitate and reclaim 99.4% of the phosphorus currently released by the plant. This goal will be satisfied by: A) pre-treatment of current waste streams to match the purity and concentration of the phosphate waste, and B) optimization of a precipitation reactor accepting variable feed substrate to remove the majority of waste phosphorus as struvite. Success in the research goals of this proposal will be of benefit to the City of Winnipeg and the greater Lake Winnipeg Basin because it reduces phosphorus loading to the lake and produces a valuable fertilizer product.