Nitrogen and Phosphorus Removal from Wastewater Using Calcareous Waste Shells—A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Nitrogen and phosphorus in freshwaters are a global environmental challenge. Concurrently, the shellfish industry’s calcareous waste shells (CWSs) amount to ~10 million tonnes annually. CWSs can effectively adsorb dissolved pollutants, including nutrients, from water, which has motivated a growing number of experimental studies on recycling CWSs in wastewater treatment. This comprehensive literature review summarises and critically assesses the effectiveness of using different CWSs for removing nutrients from water. The effects of CWS type, initial pollutant concentration, adsorbent dosage, particle size, and contact time (CT) are investigated. The results show that phosphorus removal has been examined more than nitrogen. Most studies have been conducted using synthetic wastewater under laboratory conditions only. There is a large variability in experimental conditions, such as CWS adsorbent dosages (0.1–100 g/L) and CT (0.083–360 h). The calcination of CWSs is frequently used to enhance adsorption capacity. The Langmuir isotherm model has been found to fit adsorption data best when raw oyster shells are used, while the Freundlich isotherm is best when the adsorbent is calcinated mussel shells. The pseudo-second-order (PSO) kinetics model tends to describe adsorption data better than the pseudo-first-order (PFO) model in all shell types. There is significant potential for using calcareous waste shells to remove nutrients from wastewater in line with circular economy aspirations.