Substance Flow Analysis of Phosphorous in China

Abstract

Phosphorous is an essential natural resource that is projected to run out rapidly. Environmental pollution and resource scarcity pressures require the development of a phosphorous management system in China. One of the fundamental steps to achieve this is to understand the way that phosphorous flows throughout the country. It helps to find out the current phosphorous utilization conditions and provide reliable evidence for both technology and strategy development. Based on these reasons, substance flow analysis of phosphorous was thus conducted to investigate phosphorous flow types and quantify stream values for China. The result indicates that phosphate rock resources in china will run out within 35 years at the current consumption rate, which indicates the urgency of phosphorous recovery. The substance flow analysis will also provide a guide for efficient recovery schemes design in future work. Overall, with a phosphorous crisis approaching in China, it is suggested that work be carried out into phosphorous recovery techniques and management policies.

Assessment of Phosphorus Recovery from Swine Wastewater in Beijing, China

“…PUE of the livestock sector in China was only 7% [4]. One important reason for this low PUE is that since modern market-oriented farming gradually replaced traditional self-efficient farming, the increasing need for pork and use of animal feed promoted the development of intensive farming, particularly around large cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.…”

“…In recent years, various studies have focused on identifying low PUE sectors, controlling of P losses, or recoveries [3]. It has been reported that the global livestock sector is considered one of the main contributors to serious global environmental problems [4]. PUE of the livestock sector is low [5], and causes a high risk of losing P to the environment.…”