Nutrient recovery technology draws interest from European operators

With EU fertiliser security policy under the spotlight, NPHarvest says technology offers strategic alternative to imports

Dr Juho Uzkurt Kaljunen, CEO of NPHarvest

Finnish agtech company NPHarvest has completed a successful industrial-scale demonstration of its technology that recovers nitrogen and phosphorus from wastewater, digestate, and industrial side streams.

The company said the trial – carried out in Germany – validated the system under real operating conditions and has drawn strong commercial interest from operators across Europe, who are looking to turn nutrient-rich waste streams into a domestic source of fertiliser inputs.

Commercial interest in the technology has been substantial. Within weeks of the demonstration going live, around 30 wastewater and biogas operators visited the site to see the system in operation

The trial took place over roughly two months at an industrial site in Bakum, Germany, where NPHarvest operated its demonstration unit on digestate with a total-solids load up to three times the system’s design specification. Even under these demanding conditions, the unit reached a peak ammonia-nitrogen recovery of 90.6 per cent and operated within its 70–90 per cent target range whenever conditions were within specification.

According to NPHarvest, the of the trial is a validation of the technology, and clearly demonstrates that the core recovery process performs at industrial scale in real-world conditions.

“When we launched this installation, the interest from operators was already strong – now that the system has proven itself on real digestate, that interest is only increasing,” said Milan Hofmann, managing director at Varea Water, NPHarvest’s regional project developer for Central Europe and the UK. “Plants across the region are under pressure to manage nutrients more efficiently, and they want solutions they’ve seen working, not promises.”

The demonstration unit will now be deployed in Italy to further assess its capacity to operate in a challenging environment. As EU fertiliser-security policy increasingly looks beyond imports, the company argues that recoverable nitrogen and phosphorus in domestic waste streams should be treated as strategic inputs rather than waste.