The transition to a circular economy where waste is considered as a resource to manufacture new materials and products will become increasingly important for Switzerland and Europe in the near future. With this project, we want to start positioning METAS into this new topic and especially lay the foundations for the development of inorganic analytics for sewage sludge recycling. Through this project, METAS will establish the basis to become a reference for phosphorus recycling and sewage sludge analysis.
In the first part of this project, we aim to develop methods to characterize the elemental composition (quantification of total mass fractions of elements and their speciation) of sewage sludge ash and more specifically for phosphorus recycling from sewage sludge.
In the second part a Certified Reference Material (CRM) will be developed for the determination of nutrients (such as P) and toxic elements (such as As, Cd and Pb) in sewage sludge ash.
New contacts and ideas for further projects in the field of metrology for circular economy should further be built up in the third part of the project.
The fourth part is going to be used for the organization of a PhD project in the field of trace metal speciation in sewage sludge and mineral fertilizers.
