Wiktoria Kępska, MSc
Supervisor: Tadeusz Paszko, PhD, DSc, Associate prof.
Principal Investigator: Anna Siatecka, PhD
Discipline: Agriculture and horticulture

Project title:

“Demetallization of sewage sludges towards obtaining the feedstocks for the production of safe digestates and composts”

The goal of the project is to conduct a series of experiments that will allow to optimize the process of heavy metals removing from sewage sludge using cheap protic ionic liquids. Biological stabilization (methane fermentation or composting), applied during the second step, of the sludges pre-treated with the optimum protic ionic liquid will provide organic matter stabilization. This will allow to assess to what extent the potential removal of the metals from the sludge affects their content and bioavailability in a digestate or compost. Furthermore, assessment of the toxicity of all materials (sewage sludge, digestate, compost) and their agronomic assessment will be performed to determine whether this treatment will enhance their safety and influence their fertilizing properties. Because protic ionic liquids have the ability to selectively solubilize also organic compounds (such as lignins and hemicelluloses), an essential element of this research will be to evaluate the composition and physio-chemical properties of these materials. The project implementation will allow to verify the research hypothesis, which assumes that the use of protic ionic liquids will reduce the content and bioavailability of heavy metals in sludges. This would allow sewage sludge after stabilization (biogas production, composting) to be used more widely in agriculture, at the same time solving the growing problem of harmless management of sewage sludge.

Project financed by the National Science Centre