Which market is there at the moment for these products?

The potential markets for the recovered P product are as fertilizer for conventional farming, organic farming or as feed raw material. The main benefits are the purity (e.g. less than 0.1 mg/kg Cd, very low fluorine, very low heavy metals) and the low CO₂ emissions compared to virgin products. 

The PCP can today be used directly as fertilizer. It is not fully water soluble but has the same solubility in citric acid compared to commercial mono-calcium phosphate. It can be used directly  as a slow release fertilizer or as feed phosphate. It is a versatile raw material and can be used by the existing fertilizer or feed phosphate industries for production of any kind of phosphorus product.

The legislation for feed is still linear (not circular), i.e. focusing on origin instead of quality. So even if the PCP is cleaner and have the same digestibility level as MCP (see Table 1), we still have legal barriers within the EU. The question is already on the EU commissions table to make the feed legislation circular, but it is unclear when and if this route will be open for recovered nutrients. 

The figure show a compilation of results from citric acid digestibility tests with Ash2Phos PCP, benchmarked with two different MCPs. Digestibility of P in citric acid indicates how easy the Phosphorus is dissolved in mono-gastric (chicken, pigs) animal’s stomach. The higher the % the higher is the available Phosphorus for animals. The test is the most accepted test for Phosphorus availability besides real tests on animals.

The Silica sand has potential to be used as cement replacement see our webinar on the webpage to learn more.

The Fe and Al- products are of high quality and can e.g. be recycled to the WWTP plants.