Collaborative Research: FEC: Circular Waste Resource Recovery and Water Reuse Systems to Drive Sustainability and Resiliency of the Great Plains Rural Communities

About This Grant

The Great Plains region faces an ever-increasing need to conserve dwindling water reserves from the Ogallala aquifer. The same region also annually generates more than 80% of the country’s total livestock wastes (dairy, beef, swine), raising concerns about the impact on water quality and living conditions. About 12– 35% of the water used annually for production-intensive agriculture in Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma combined (8 M acre-ft/yr) can potentially be derived by recovering and treating water contained in livestock waste. A team of interdisciplinary researchers from Kansas State University (KSU), Seward County Community College (SCCC), Oklahoma State University (OSU), and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), representing three contiguous EPSCoR jurisdictions, will synergize their complementary research capacities to enable adoption of circular waste resource recovery and water reuse technology platforms. This research will enhance economic resiliency, environmental sustainability, and quality of life in Great Plains micropolitan communities. The overall project objective is to build regional research capacity and develop an economically viable, socially accepted, and efficient circular resource recovery platform integrated with water reuse from livestock wastes that are copiously generated in the region. The proposed work would build capacity for use-inspired research to be demonstrated for adoption by livestock operations in southwest Kansas first (Liberal, KS), in collaboration with SCCC, and with regionwide adoption potential. The project will integrate a wide array of workforce development activities such as an early-career faculty development program and technical skills training through exchange site visits. Workforce development initiatives will be guided by an industry-government advisory council composed of livestock and agricultural producers, local associations and councils, and government/policy representatives. During this project, critically important and complex concepts such as resource recovery will be introduced to participating students and the public through science cafés, summer research field experiences, and interactions with public utilities to realize the research advances at scale. This will enable a holistic framework and encourage incorporation of the circular resource recovery and reuse systems into the rural communities and workforce. This collaborative research team seeks to achieve optimal circular waste resource recovery and water reuse technology platforms through three interconnected research thrusts. Research Thrust 1 aims to develop the Anaerobic Sequencing Batch Reactor (ASBR), Anaerobic Membrane Bioreactor (AnMBR), and Microbial Electrochemical Cell (MxC) platforms for holistic recovery of swine manure co-digested with fats, oils, and grease (FOG) to produce methane or organic acids, hydrogen peroxide, nutrients (N and P) as tunable-release inorganic fertilizers (Octacalcium phosphate and struvite), and treated water for reuse. Such groundbreaking advancements in membrane science will be guided by Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning. Research Thrust 2 focuses on circular water reuse by combining advanced oxidation and membrane-based processes, including using waste-derived hydrogen peroxide to produce high-quality water. Specific focus will be placed on mitigating antimicrobial resistance, a prevalent and understudied issue in rural water supplies. Research Thrust 3 will integrate techno-economic and risk simulation with agribusiness decision node modeling for region-specific adoption of the circular systems. Human dimensions, including cultural perceptions, assessments of safety and security risks, and social-economic impacts of the proposed technologies, will be analyzed from representative communities. Collective research capacity from the contiguous jurisdictions will be synergized and verified through a field demonstration of the AnMBR + advanced oxidation unit at Liberal, KS, in Year 4 of the project. New avenues for cross-convergent research between applied and pure science-based researchers as well as potential manufacturing and industry partners will be achieved throughout this proposal. Synergistic research that co-addresses engineering grand challenges and society-based sustainable development goals, such as responsible consumption and production, clean water and sanitation, will also be demonstrated. This project is supported by the EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement Program: Focused EPSCoR Collaborations Program (FEC). FEC supports interjurisdictional teams of EPSCoR investigators to perform research in topics that align with NSF priorities, with the goals of driving discovery and building sustainable STEM capacity. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.