At the Aslan Biomass biogas plant in Ankara, NPHarvest has launched an industrial demonstration to recover nitrogen and phosphorus from concentrated wastewater, producing ammonium sulfate and reusable phosphates

Author: Marco Arezio. Expert in circular economy, polymer recycling, and industrial processes. Founder of the rMIX platform.

Date: April 3, 2026

Reading time: 10 minutes

Why the Ankara demo changes the way we look at wastewater treatment

In the wastewater treatment sector, people often continue to think in linear terms: the effluent arrives, it is treated, unwanted fractions are separated, and the aim is to minimize environmental damage. The industrial demonstration launched by NPHarvest in Ankara suggests a different and much more contemporary interpretation: nutrient-rich effluent is not merely a problem to neutralize, but a reserve of value to be intercepted before it becomes a cost, a risk, or a loss of material. For chronological accuracy, the news does not belong to 2026 but to August 2025; however, it remains fully relevant because it concerns one of the most sensitive issues in the European circular economy: transforming nitrogen and phosphorus dispersed in wastewater into local fertilizer inputs.

In Ankara, the significance of the project arises precisely from the intersection of three industrial tensions. The first is territorial: in that area, and particularly in the Polatli region, the concentration of agricultural activities and biogas plants makes it difficult to safely absorb the entire nutrient load present in liquid effluents. The second is plant-related: liquid digestate cannot be moved indefinitely to fields and farms without reaching logistical, economic, and environmental thresholds. The third is geopolitical: in Europe, the security of fertilizer supplies has become a strategic issue, no longer merely an agronomic one.

NPHarvest in Ankara: what has been launched

The project concerns NPHarvest’s first real-scale industrial demonstration unit at the Aslan Biomass biogas plant, in collaboration with ASKİ, the Ankara Water and Sewerage Administration. According to the company’s official sources and the Embassy of Finland in Türkiye, this is a mobile 20 m³/day unit designed to recover nutrients from concentrated liquid streams, such as biogas digestate, and to verify its behavior under realistic operating conditions. The host plant generates around 700 m³/day of liquid digestate, so the demo does not represent a full-site solution: it is an industrial trial aimed at validating the system’s technical, energy, and economic scalability.

This detail is decisive. Many industry reports use the expression “industrial scale” in an ambiguous, almost promotional way. Here, however, the meaning is more rigorous: this is neither a laboratory nor a test bench, but neither is it a final plant capable of treating the site’s entire flow. We are at the most important intermediate step in any serious wastewater treatment innovation: the point at which the technology stops working only “in principle” and must prove that it can handle flow rates, effluent variability, operational continuity, maintenance, integration with the existing line, and stable quality of the recovered products. This is the threshold at which many promising technologies fail; the fact that NPHarvest chose to present itself სწორედ there makes the demo interesting beyond the news itself.

How nitrogen and phosphorus are recovered from concentrated wastewater

The technology described by NPHarvest is based on two main steps. The first concerns phosphorus: the effluent is alkalized and, when phosphorus recovery is planned, calcium hydroxide is typically used to promote the precipitation of a recoverable phase described as amorphous calcium phosphate. The second concerns nitrogen: after the pH is raised, ammonia is transferred through hydrophobic membranes and reacts on the opposite side with an acid, normally sulfuric acid, forming an ammonium salt, in this case ammonium sulfate.

From an industrial point of view, however, the key message is another one: the company states that the process operates without heating, without aeration, and without significant process pressure, with energy demand essentially limited to pumping and with chemical management based on alkali and acid. It also claims the ability to treat effluents with total suspended solids up to 3%, a significant point because many separation technologies become sensitive to fouling, clogging, or costly pre-treatment when the matrix is dirty and variable.

This does not mean that the system alone “solves” the entire wastewater treatment process. NPHarvest itself specifies that the process recovers nitrogen and phosphorus, but does not replace the treatment required for the other pollutants present in the effluent. This is an important clarification, because it avoids one of the most common misunderstandings in the narrative of environmental innovation: material recovery does not automatically eliminate the remaining wastewater treatment obligations, but rather reorganizes them in a more efficient logic, removing part of the problematic load from the treatment line and transforming it into a product.

From biogas digestate to fertilizer: the industrial heart of the project

The true symbolic and industrial strength of the Ankara demo lies in its positioning within the biogas chain. Liquid digestate is a stream known for its nutrient content, but also for the difficulties linked to transport, land spreading, soil absorption capacity, and the risk of impacts on groundwater, soil, and ecosystems if management is not rigorous. In the official communication reported by the project sources, ASKİ explicitly links nutrient recovery to groundwater protection and the reduction of treatment costs, emphasizing that uncontrolled discharge of the liquid fraction can cause significant environmental damage.

In this sense, Ankara tells not only the story of a technical solution, but of a change in management paradigm. According to NPHarvest, the Aslan Biomass plant previously transported nutrient-rich waters to regional fields and farms; now the limits of the territory’s absorption capacity make that strategy less sustainable. Recovering nutrients on-site therefore means doing three things at once: reducing local pressure on the territory, extracting economic value from a stream that is costly to manage, and making high-purity fertilizer inputs marketable or reusable. This is exactly where wastewater treatment meets the industrial logic of the circular economy.

The numbers behind the demo: capacity, recovered products, and full-scale potential

According to NPHarvest’s official statement, the technology installed in Ankara could recover, on an equivalent annual basis, about 93 tonnes of ammonium sulfate and up to 73 tonnes of phosphorus-based product. The same statement estimates that a full-scale installation could reach about 3,255 tonnes of ammonium sulfate and up to 2,555 tonnes of phosphorus product. It is essential to read these figures carefully: the demo remains on site only for a few months, so the values associated with the “demo” should be understood as declared annual equivalents, not as the actual annual output of the module permanently installed on site.

These figures, although provided by the company and not presented as an independent third-party verification, are still useful for understanding the scale of the problem and the opportunity. The difference between the demo’s 20 m³/day and the host site’s 700 m³/day in fact shows two things. The first is that technical validation does not yet coincide with full industrial penetration. The second is that, if the model works, the leap in value derives not only from avoided wastewater treatment but also from the production of two recovered streams with potential market value: an ammonium salt and a phosphorus fraction reusable in fertilizers. In terms of industrial business, this is the transition from cost center to value-creation hub.

Why nutrient recovery has become strategic in Europe

The deep relevance of the Ankara demo becomes clear when viewed against the European fertilizer context.

In a later update from December 2025, NPHarvest placed the issue in an even broader framework, claiming that in 2024 the EU imported more than 6.2 million tonnes of Russian fertilizers, equal to about 22% of total supply, for more than 2.2 billion euros. Even taking these figures as company statements rather than definitive regulatory statistics, the direction remains clear: Europe is looking for local alternatives that are less vulnerable and less exposed to geopolitical or price shocks. In this scenario, nutrient recovery from effluents and digestates is no longer a marginal conference topic, but an industrial lever of resilience.

The technical limits that must not be ignored in nutrient recovery from wastewater

Precisely because the topic is promising, it must be protected from easy rhetoric. Recovering nutrients is not simple merely because a membrane or precipitation chemistry exists. Industrial continuity depends on the composition of the effluent, fluctuations in load, the presence of solids, reagent stability, the commercial quality of the recovered products, and the overall treatment cost compared with alternative management options. NPHarvest’s own technology defines an economic threshold of interest for nitrogen starting from concentrations above 500 g/m³, implicitly signaling that not every effluent is suitable for the same recovery model.

There is also another point that must be made explicit from an EEAT perspective: today, the Ankara demo above all demonstrates an industrialization trajectory, not yet a consolidated diffusion across a wide network. The project shows that on-site nutrient recovery can be technically organized in a real plant; it does not yet prove, by itself, that the model is economically optimal in every biogas plant or in every municipal wastewater treatment system. That conclusion will require more cases, more long-term operational data, and regulatory and commercial standardization of the products obtained. This is not a weakness of the project; it is simply its correct stage of maturity.

Environmental, economic, and management impacts for wastewater treatment plants and biogas facilities

If the technology maintains in real operation what it promises in official communications, the potential impact is considerable. For a biogas plant or for a manager of concentrated effluents, recovering nutrients on site means reducing the volume of nutrients that must be disposed of or distributed territorially, containing logistical costs, easing environmental risk, and creating a new value stream from a current normally perceived as problematic. For a public body such as ASKİ, the advantage is also institutional: demonstrating that advanced wastewater treatment can be a policy of groundwater protection and resource economy, not merely a practice of regulatory compliance.

There is also a frequently overlooked aspect. Agronomic tests communicated by NPHarvest in December 2025, carried out with the University of Helsinki’s Viikki research farm and verified by Eurofins, found no measurable differences in yield and nutrient uptake between recycled nutrients and commercial fertilizers, with outputs 30–40% higher than in unfertilized plots. These are company data, of course, but if they are confirmed on a broader scale, they will strengthen the idea that the value of recovery lies not only in environmental removal, but in the real agronomic substitutability of the recovered product.

What Ankara teaches the European circular fertilizer chain

Ankara offers us a very concrete lesson. The wastewater treatment of the future will not be able to limit itself to reducing discharge parameters; it will have to know how to intercept critical matter before it is dispersed. This is even more true for nitrogen and phosphorus, that is, for elements that are essential in agriculture but that, if poorly managed in water, become factors of environmental pressure. The NPHarvest demo makes a simple industrial truth visible: what we now call effluent is often a mixture in which treatment cost and potential value coexist. The competitiveness of the technology will lie in separating the two reliably.

Moreover, the fact that the demo was placed in Türkiye is not a peripheral detail. The project’s official sources indicate that the country has more than 2,000 wastewater treatment plants, a figure that suggests significant replication potential. If one adds the presence of agricultural chains, biogas digestates, and the need to protect water resources, the Turkish case emerges as a possible expansion laboratory for solutions that could then spread to other European and Mediterranean contexts. In other words, Ankara is not only the site of the first demo; it may become the place where the industrial transferability of the model is measured.

The future of wastewater treatment is not only to remove, but to enhance

The Ankara news matters because it tells the story of a boundary that is shifting. For decades, wastewater treatment had as its absolute priority removal: reduce, separate, confine, dispose. Today, without giving up these duties, industry is beginning to ask for something more: recover nutrients, generate circular fertilizers, cut energy and logistical costs, reduce external dependencies, and build new local economies around effluents. NPHarvest, with all the physiological limits of a technology in an advanced phase of industrialization, is trying to occupy exactly this space.

In the end, the point is not only whether the Ankara demo will work well. The point is that it stages a change that has become inevitable: in the wastewater treatment of the twenty-first century, it will no longer be enough to treat water; it will be necessary to understand what can be recovered before returning it. And when the recoverable materials include nitrogen and phosphorus, that is, two invisible pillars of food security and the stability of agricultural costs, then an industrial demo ceases to be a local technical fact and becomes a strategic signal for the entire European circular economy.

FAQ

Is the Ankara demo a final plant or an industrial trial?

It is a real-scale industrial trial, not yet the final installation capable of treating the entire flow of the site. The declared capacity is 20 m³/day, compared with about 700 m³/day of liquid digestate from the host site.

Which nutrients does NPHarvest technology recover?

It mainly recovers nitrogen and phosphorus, transforming them respectively into an ammonium salt, typically ammonium sulfate, and into a phosphorus product described as amorphous calcium phosphate.

Does the process replace the entire wastewater treatment of the effluent?

No. The company itself clarifies that the system addresses nitrogen and phosphorus recovery, but the residual effluent must still be treated for the other pollutants according to the needs of the wastewater treatment line.

Why is this demo important for Europe?

Because it fits into a context in which the EU introduced, from July 1, 2025, new tariffs on certain Russian and Belarusian fertilizers, encouraging the search for local and more resilient nutrient sources.

Do the recovered fertilizers really work in agriculture?

According to tests communicated by NPHarvest in December 2025, the recycled nutrients showed performance comparable to conventional fertilizers in terms of yield and nutrient uptake, in tests conducted with the University of Helsinki’s Viikki research farm and verified by Eurofins.

What is the main limit to monitor in these technologies?

The real test is not only the chemical principle, but industrial continuity: reagent costs, effluent variability, merchant quality of the product, operational reliability, and competitiveness compared with alternative management options.

Sources

NPHarvest official release on the launch of the Ankara demo

NPHarvest official technical page on the recovery technology

NPHarvest update on agronomic tests of recovered nutrients

Council of the European Union and Access2Markets on EU tariffs related to fertilizers from Russia and Belarus

Finland Abroad institutional note on the cooperation between NPHarvest, ASKİ, and Aslan Biomass in Ankara

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