Work

Resource recovery strategies and schemes: A regional case study on sewage sludge hub centres in Italy

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Regional sludge treatment hubs can be solutions to overcome the bottleneck of the proper economy of scale to deliver sustainable resource recovery and safe reuse in non-metropolitan areas. Starting from the pilot-scale knowledge gathered by the Horizon2020 SMART-Plant innovation action, a real regional sludge hub centres has been planned and designed to treat and valorise sewage sludge from 52 municipalities scattered in the province of Treviso and about 500,000 residents. In the first phase regional resource recovery and safe reuse potential were assessed by critically considering and benchmarking long-term chemical and physical characteristics of the sewage sludge from the region. This was also relevant to consider about the replicability of the sludge hub scheme beyond the specific case study. In the second phase, a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) was carried out considering the valorisation to compost, mineral phosphorus salts, biogas, and/or biopolymers (polyhydroxyalkanoates). The final environmental impacts of the entire system were also normalised by the annual impact potential of an average European, using the revised ReCiPe 2016 normalisation values. The results indicate that the scenario delivering phosphorus and biopolymer recovery is the most sustainable, reducing total emissions by the equivalent of 176 people per day when compared to the current decentralised scenario.

Source: Journal of Water Process Engineering

DOI: 10.1016/j.jwpe.2025.107696