Editorial : Organic waste and wastewater - Resources to recover

Although the first sewer systems date back to ancient times, it has taken centuries to progress to modern management of sewage and waste. Initiated to solve sanitation problems, significant advances have been made in the field since the 1970s and 1980s, coinciding with an increasing awareness of resource scarcity and the need to protect an environment mistreated by human activity.
Irstea’s expertise and its research activities made significant contributions to these developments. Their aim was to advance knowledge to support public and private organizations in designing, developping, operating and optimizing treatment and recovery facilities for wastewater, agricultural effluent and organic waste. Using a multidisciplinary and multiscale approach (from bacteria to processing chains, from laboratory settings to fullscale installations), teams from the Technologies and processes for wastewater and waste (TED) research topic are developing new processes and optimizing existing technologies. They are recognized within the international scientific community for work on topics such as anaerobic digestion, which responds to the dual challenge of recycling and recovering energy from organic waste, functional microbiology, modeling wastewater treatment, and wastewater treatment facilities adapted to small communities.
Other scientific themes are equally promising. Environmental evaluation tools (including life cycle assessment, LCA) improve identification of the environmental impact of waste management or wastewater treatment. Recycling phosphorus from livestock farming effluent and wastewater provides a solution to excess manure spreading and today’s decreasing phosphate deposits. Finally, wastewater treatment processes and chainsare currently being reviewed with the aim of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
This research is conducted in partnership with public (Onema, Ademe, government ministries, water agencies, etc.), academic and private organizations as part of the Carnot Institutes program. All share the same objective: moving away from waste treatment toward waste recovery (producing electricity, fertilizers, high added-value molecules and reusing treated wastewater, etc.).
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