R&D and Engineering team at Uppsala
Through close collaboration between R&D and Engineering, EasyMining is turning the Ash2Phos process into the world's first full-scale phosphorus recovery plant.

The art of collaboration: upscaling a first-of-its-kind plant

A partnership between two core EasyMining teams to scale up the Ash2Phos process into a full chemical plant will have serious significance for the future in more ways than one.

29 Oct 2026

Transforming any chemical process into a full-scale plant is never easy, but upscaling new technology for an industrial facility for the first time is especially challenging.

When EasyMining’s Ash2Phos plant in Schkopau, Germany starts operating  in 2027, it will be the first facility of its kind in the world. A joint venture with the German utility company and wastewater treatment provider Gelsenwasser, the plant will recover phosphorus (a critical nutrient in fertilisers and livestock feed) and other resources from 30,000 tonnes of incinerated sewage sludge per year.

At EasyMining, close collaboration between the Research & Development (R&D) Team, which discovers and refines chemical processes for resource recovery, and the Engineering Team, which turns those processes into full-scale plant operations, has been key to making the Schkopau plant a reality. 

This technical partnership will soon reach a crescendo of intensity for the project’s final phase, but its impact will extend far beyond the plant.

Michael MeyerMichael Meyer, Senior R&D Engineer and R&D Lead for Ash2Phos, EasyMining, Uppsala, Sweden.

“We’re facing things that we maybe hadn't foreseen or questions that we hadn’t considered”

According to Michael Meyer, Senior R&D Engineer at EasyMining and R&D Lead for Ash2Phos, scaling up a chemical process into a working plant always requires some level of collaboration.

“It's not like R&D just hands over a set of parameters and Engineering takes it from there and that’s it. Especially when you're scaling up a process for a first-of-its-kind plant rather than one that has already been built dozens of times around the world, he says.

And the difference in the teams’ roles often comes with clashing perspectives. 

“I think R&D are really open-minded and good at seeing all the possibilities, and I think at Engineering we see more difficulties,” says Hanna Landbring, EasyMining’s Engineering Manager and Lead Process Engineer for the Ash2Phos project.

Yet developing and building the Schkopau plant has demanded both mindsets.

“We are doing this for the first time, and we’re facing things that we maybe hadn't foreseen or questions that we hadn’t considered before. We need to solve those together,” says Landbring.

Hanna Landbring
Hanna Landbring, Engineering Manager and Lead Process Engineer for Ash2Phos, EasyMining, Gothenburg, Sweden.

Setting up an iterative process

The collaboration in our teams traces back to several joint pilot projects in the late 2010s and early 2020s related to Ash2Phos, which validated the feasibility of reproducing the technology on a larger scale and the equipment to do so.

Through those initial efforts, the teams found ways to work across their contrasting approaches but also geographic distance. Since EasyMining’s earliest days, the R&D Team has been based in Uppsala, about an hour’s drive north of Stockholm, and the Engineering Team is in Gothenburg on Sweden’s west coast, about 500 kilometres clear across the country.    

Alongside the digital solutions most organisations use today, the teams established regular, structured communication, such as a weekly virtual meeting where R&D presents laboratory findings and Engineering shares project updates.

But there’s also been an emphasis on meeting face-to-face.

“We’ve always had yearly kickoffs where we all met in person, and whenever a new process engineer joins, we send them to Uppsala for a few days to get to know the team there,” says Landbring.
 

This framework for collaboration proved to be essential during Ash2Phos’s large-scale piloting phase, an intense period of work to determine the fundamental parameters and conditions for future upscaling. Soon afterwards, planning for the Ash2Phos plant in Schkopau was in full swing. The R&D and Engineering Teams then had to work together through overlapping stages – from equipment testing steps and process diagramming to 3D modelling and plant design – leading up to the start of construction in May 2025.

As a result, the teams have cultivated an iterative process for collaborating on specific upscaling issues.

“We hit the lab, investigate, and then come to Engineering and say, ‘Okay, we think you could tweak it this way.’ Engineering then takes it, does the calculations and testing, and it goes back and forth like that, sometimes for several rounds,” Meyer says.
 
And there’s still collaboration ahead. Once construction is complete, the Schkopau plant will enter the commissioning phase, and the teams will be on-site to review and fine-tune everything as the facility runs the Ash2Phos process for the first time.

Michael Meyer
Michael Meyer and his team test and refine process solutions in EasyMining’s laboratory in Uppsala.

Invaluable insights along the way

Because operational challenges in upscaling can reveal issues undetectable in the lab and pilot stages, EasyMining’s R&D and Engineering Teams have made several improvements to the Ash2Phos process while developing its first full-scale plant.

For example, a specific reagent was originally used in the chemical precipitation step to isolate and remove heavy metals, which was fine in smaller-scale iterations but turned out to be a potential hazard in a plant.

“During the upscaling phase, we identified that the chosen reagent could pose a safety risk to operators on site. Together with the engineering team, we evaluated alternative solutions, tested them in the lab, and ultimately selected a safer precipitation agent,” says Meyer.
 

In addition, industrial processes often have to be adjusted to optimise outputs for the market. Ferric chloride, for instance, isn't Ash2Phos's main product but has valuable uses in wastewater treatment, if it meets certain standards.

“We had one process solution that we used, but then we realised, ‘okay, this product is not actually stable. So, we added a purification step that was not in the design at the start,” says Landbring.
 

But the collaboration on Ash2Phos has also yielded insights for chemical processes yet to be developed.

“All these upscaling considerations have never really been a focal point for us until now. And that will certainly help us in our future work,” says Meyer.
 

It’s even provided an understanding for how to navigate the realities of building future plants faster and more effectively.

“I think there were a lot of lessons learned on how we can work better, and we’ll definitely build on those lessons going forward,” says Landbring.
 

World’s first Ash2Phos plant

EasyMining is building the world’s first full-scale phosphorus recovery plant using its patented Ash2Phos technology in Schkopau, Germany. The facility is planned to start operations in 2027 and will process 30,000 tonnes of incinerated sewage sludge ash per year.

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