Abstract
BackgroundPollution of the Baltic Sea continues to be a problem. Major terrestrial sources of nutrient emissions to the Baltic Sea are agriculture and wastewater, both major causes of eutrophication. Wastewater contains nutrients and organic matter that could constitute valuable products such as agricultural fertilizers and source of energy. With the EU’s action plan for circular economy, waste management and resource utilization is central. Thus the integration of resource recovery to wastewater management could create benefits beyond the wastewater sector. There is a growing interest in resource recovery from wastewater. However, there is no systematic overview of the literature on technologies to recover nutrients and carbon from wastewater sources done to date.MethodsThis systematic map will identify a representative list of studies on ecotechnologies for reusing carbon and nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) from domestic wastewater, which includes e.g. sewage sludge and wastewater fractions. Searches will be performed in five bibliographic databases, one search engine and 38 specialist websites. Searches will mainly be performed in English, search for literature in specialist websites will also include Finnish, Polish and Swedish. Coding and meta-data extraction will include information on ecotechnology name and short description, reuse outcome (i.e. reuse of carbon, nitrogen and/or phosphorus), type of reuse (i.e. whether it is explicit or implicit), study country and location, latitude and longitude. All screening and coding will be done after initial consistency checking. The outcomes of this systematic map will be a searchable database of coded studies. Findings will be presented in a geo-informational system (i.e. an evidence atlas) and knowledge gaps and clusters will be visualised via heat maps.
Highlights
Pollution of the Baltic Sea continues to be a problem
The Baltic Sea is vulnerable to waterborne nutrient loadings because of its large catchment in relation to the sea area, a long renewal time and limited water exchange with the North Sea
We add on to the definition that the ecotechnologies should be related to wastewater management and facilitate the reuse of carbon and/or nutrients
Summary
The review will follow the Collaboration for Environmental Evidence guidelines and standards for evidence synthesis in environmental management [16] and it conforms to ROSES reporting standards [17] (see Additional file 1). Searches will be performed across a suite of relevant organisational websites for ecotechnologies for the reuse of carbon and nutrients. The reference lists of all relevant reviews will be screened for relevant studies at title, abstract and full text levels. Eligible outcome(s) Described reuse of carbon and nutrients from wastewater management process. The type of reuse is explicit, fully described, if it is stated in the article how the reuse outcome will be used, e.g. as a fertilizer It is implicit or potential reuse if the use of the carbon or nutrients is not described, or reuse is stated as a possibility. Meta-data extraction will be performed by multiple reviewers following consistency checking on a parallel coding of subset of between 23 and 45 full texts, discussing all disagreements.
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