Sustainability

Wastewater treatment systems that install Ostara’s water treatment technology Pearl® Nutrient Recovery Process contribute to environmental sustainability from several perspectives:

• They emit fewer pollutants into the environment,
• They displace commercial products that pollute the environment with a non-polluting commercial product, and
• They generate a new, renewable and non-polluting form of a resource that is essential to the world’s food supply. By contrast, conventional production of this resource is energy-intensive, polluting and contributes to global warming.

1. Pipes of wastewater plants that install Pearl® remain free of phosphate build-up (struvite) that otherwise would be mechanically or chemically removed and discarded into the water table or incinerated and released into the air. Wastewater treatment facilities with Pearl® thereby contribute to the preservation of the local and regional water table and atmosphere.

2. The struvite extracted/captured from the wastewater treatment plant’s pipes by Pearl® is recovered into a premium commercial fertilizer, the attributes of which include slow release into the soil. This slow release avoids phosphorus leaching into the water table. Wherever golf courses, nurseries or specialty growers replace conventional phosphate fertilizer with this slow-release fertilizer, the quality of the local water table is preserved.

   Each year more than 100 million tons of phosphate rock are mined and processed into fertilizer. Over time this fertilizer enters the ecosystem as waste and agricultural runoff, leading to excessive nutrient levels, or a condition known as eutrophication. Eutrophication causes excessive algae growth in lakes, streams and oceans which depletes the oxygen supply in the water that is necessary to support aquatic life.

   Crystal Green®'s slow-release of nutrients virtually eliminates run-off and ensures that all nutrients remain in the soil where they are applied, and do not end up in adjacent waterways, polluting the environment. The increasing accumulation of nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen, discharged into the environment is one of the most significant environmental challenges facing the planet, according to the 2005 United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.

3. Wastewater treatment systems that install Pearl® provide a renewable and non-polluting form of phosphorus, a non-renewable resource that is critical to the world’s food supply but the conventional production of which generates greenhouse gases.
   The conventional phosphorus fertilizer production cycle is an energy-intensive process that releases greenhouse gases into the environment at every stage:
   1. mining of phosphorus ore,
   2. concentration into phosphate rock,
   3. transportation from mine sites around the world,
   4. centralized manufacture into fertilizer, and
   5. transportation to customers. 

Crystal Green® is the only slow release fertilizer made from a renewable source of phosphorus – wastewater

“Mining phosphorus for fertilizer is consuming the mineral faster than geologic cycles can replenish it. The U.S. may runout of its accessible domestic sources in a few decades, and few other countries have substantial reserves, which could also be depleted in about a century. This underappreciated resource--a key component of fertilizers--is still decades from running out. But we must act now to conserve it, or future agriculture could collapse.” Scientific American Magazine, June 2009

“Experts disagree on how much phosphate is left and how quickly it will be exhausted. But many argue that a shortage is coming and that it will leave the world’s future food supply hanging in the balance.” (NATURE, October 2009)