Towards effective recovery of humate as green fertilizer from landfill leachate concentrate by electro-neutral nanofiltration membrane

Wenyuan Ye; Mingqiu Hong; Xuan Huang; Tianci Chen; Ailiang Gu; Xiaocheng Lin; Xuewei Li; Xiangrong Chen; Dong Han Seo; Shuaifei Zhao; Xueming Chen; Bart Van der Bruggen; Ming Xie; Jiuyang Lin

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.165335

Towards effective recovery of humate as green fertilizer from landfill leachate concentrate by electro-neutral nanofiltration membrane

Sci Total Environ. 2023 Oct 20:896:165335. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.165335. Epub 2023 Jul 5.

Authors

Wenyuan Ye¹, Mingqiu Hong¹, Xuan Huang², Tianci Chen³, Ailiang Gu², Xiaocheng Lin⁴, Xuewei Li³, Xiangrong Chen⁵, Dong Han Seo⁶, Shuaifei Zhao⁷, Xueming Chen⁸, Bart Van der Bruggen⁹, Ming Xie¹⁰, Jiuyang Lin¹¹

Affiliations

¹ Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Soil Environmental Health and Regulation, College of Resources and Environment, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou 350002, China.
² Jiangsu DDBS Environmental Remediation Co., Ltd., 210012 Nanjing, China.
³ Ganjiang Innovation Academy, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ganzhou 341000, China.
⁴ College of Chemical Engineering, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou 350108, PR China.
⁵ State Key Laboratory of Biochemical Engineering, Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China.
⁶ Institute of Energy Materials & Devices, Korea Institute of Energy Technology (KENTECH), Naju, Republic of Korea.
⁷ Deakin University, Geelong, Institute for Frontier Materials, VIC 3216, Australia.
⁸ School of Environment and Safety Engineering, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou 350116, China.
⁹ Department of Chemical Engineering, Process Engineering for Sustainable Systems (ProcESS), KU Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200F, B-3001 Leuven, Belgium.
¹⁰ Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, United Kingdom.
¹¹ Ganjiang Innovation Academy, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ganzhou 341000, China; Key Laboratory of Rare Earths, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ganzhou 341000, China. Electronic address: jylin@gia.cas.cn.

PMID: 37414167
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2023.165335

Abstract

Under the environmental sustainability concept, landfill leachate concentrate can be up-cycled as a useful resource. Practical strategy for effective management of landfill leachate concentrate is to recover the existing humate as fertilizer purpose for plant growth. Herein, we designed an electro-neutral nanofiltration membrane to separate the humate and inorganic salts for achieving a sufficient humate recovery from leachate concentrate. The electro-neutral nanofiltration membrane yielded a high retention of humate (96.54 %) with an extremely low salt rejection (3.47 %), tremendously outperforming the state-of-the-art nanofiltration membranes and exhibiting superior promise in fractionation of humate and inorganic salts. With implementation of the pressure-driven concentration process, the electro-neutral nanofiltration membrane enriched the humate from 1756 to 51,466 mg∙L^-1 at a fold of 32.6, enabling 90.0 % humate recovery and 96.4 % desalination efficiency from landfill leachate concentrate. Furthermore, the recovered humate not only exerted no phytotoxicity, but also significantly promoted the metabolism of red bean plants, serving as an effective green fertilizer. The study provides a conceptual and technical platform using high-performance electro-neutral nanofiltration membranes to extract the humate as a promising nutrient for fertilizer application, in view of sustainable landfill leachate concentrate treatment.

Keywords: Desalination; Electro-neutral nanofiltration membranes; Green fertilizer; Humate extraction; Landfill leachate concentrate.