Most of us don’t tend to think about what happens to the water we use to wash our hands, flush a toilet or do a load of laundry. But once it flows down our drains and out of our households, its journey is only just beginning. From there, wastewater is collected and sent to treatment plants, where it is cleaned before the water can be safely returned to the environment. But treating wastewater also produces a by-product: wastewater sludge.
Every year, Australia produces around 1.4 million tonnes of wastewater sludge. Much of this sludge is still treated as waste and sent to landfill, even though it contains significant amounts of recoverable energy. Currently, less than 10% of this energy potential is being recovered.
This research asks how we can unlock more of the energy already contained in wastewater sludge and turn an underused resource into a greater source of renewable energy.
The research is developing a low-cost technology that can recover significantly more energy from wastewater sludge than conventional approaches. It can use waste by-products from other industries to improve the process, bringing two waste streams together to generate more renewable energy. This turns a growing waste problem into an opportunity to recover valuable energy, reduce landfill and support Australia’s transition towards net zero.