Nutrient Recovery from Municipal Wastewater for Sustainable Food Production Systems: An Alternative to Traditional Fertilizers.

Traditional wastewater management uses end-of-pipe approaches to remove pollutants in wastewater before discharge. Although effective in human health protection for decades, this approach of removal and disposal requires a high investment of energy and materials and overlooks the values of the key nutrients in wastewater such as phosphorus (P). Phosphorus in wastewater comes from the human metabolites of food, resulted from crop uptakes of fertilizer that ultimately derived from phosphate rock (PR).

The Emergy Perspective of Sustainable Trends in Puerto Rico from 1960 to 2013.

Emergy analysis quantifies the direct and indirect contributions of nature to human systems providing a sustainability assessment framework, which couples economic growth within biophysical constraints. In this study, Puerto Rico's sustainability was assessed with emergy flow dynamics from 1960 to 2013. During this period, the island shifted from an agriculture-based economy to an industrial base of manufacture and services (1960-1970).

Assessing sustainability in real urban systems: the Greater Cincinnati Metropolitan Area in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana.

Urban systems have a number of factors (i.e., economic, social, and environmental) that can potentially impact growth, change, and transition.