Extracting high-value nutrients from agri-wastes: Impact on struvite production and pathogen reduction**

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The potential impact of disposing untreated poultry manure (PM) in the environment is one of the Canada agriculture's major challenges considering high volume of this agri-waste. Treatment technologies such as anaerobic digestion (AD) can play an important role in the management of PM by providing an alternative to land application through solving specific problems such as odors, pathogens, water pollution, GHG emissions, and phosphorus and heavy metal contamination of soils to some magnitude. This method has not been industrialized yet due to the problems such as high amounts of total solid (TS) and high content of ammonia in PM which result in inhibition of methanogenic archaea. Despite the effectiveness of AD process, digested materials from PM will still contain organics and excess nutrients that could lead to ammonia emissions, groundwater pollution or eutrophication of lakes as a result of rainwater runoff. ****Recovering nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, from nutrient-rich PM wastes could solve the above problem. It provides a promising cost-effective option not only for tackling high ammonia content issue but also provides an alternative for commercial fertilizers. As commercial fertilizers are primarily produced from finite and non-renewable phosphorus rock reserves, they are expected to become more scarce and expensive. Viable alternatives should reduce the fertilizer costs at the farm scale. Integrating the nutrient recovery system into the AD treatment scheme could play a key role in reducing nutrients and other pollutional load into land, ground water or lake, while producing fertilizer suitable for sustainable cultivation as well as food production. However, critical research is needed in order to determine the feasibility of both processes, nutrient content of struvite, and survival of pathogens and presence of microbial resistance in digested materials which are the main milestones of this proposed project. The outcomes of this project will benefit the Canadian agricultural sectors****