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Abstract The Twin Falls, Idaho wastewater treatment plant (WWTP), currently operates solely to achieve regulatory permit compliance. Research was conducted to evaluate conversion of the WWTP to a water resource recovery facility (WRRF) and to assess the WRRF environmental sustainability; process configurations were evaluated to produce five resources—reclaimed water, biosolids, struvite, biogas, and bioplastics (polyhydroxyalkanoates, PHA). PHA production occurred using fermented dairy manure. State‐of‐the‐art biokinetic modeling, performed using Dynamita's SUMO process model, was coupled with environmental life cycle assessment to quantify environmental sustainability. Results indicate that electricity production via combined heat and power (CHP) was most important in achieving environmental sustainability; energy offset ranged from 43% to 60%, thereby reducing demand for external fossil fuel‐based energy. While struvite production helps maintain a resilient enhanced biological phosphorus removal (EBPR) process, MgO2production exhibits negative environmental impacts; integration with CHP negates the adverse consequences. Integrating dairy manure to produce bioplastics diversifies the resource recovery portfolio while maintaining WRRF environmental sustainability; pilot‐scale evaluations demonstrated that WRRF effluent quality was not affected by the addition of effluent from PHA production. Collectively, results show that a WRRF integrating dairy manure can yield a diverse portfolio of products while operating in an environmentally sustainable manner. Practitioner pointsWastewater carbon recovery via anaerobic digestion with combined heat/power production significantly reduces water resource recovery facility (WRRF) environmental emissions.Wastewater phosphorus recovery is of value; however, struvite production exhibits negative environmental impacts due to MgO2production emissions.Bioplastics production on imported organic‐rich agri‐food waste can diversify the WRRF portfolio.Dairy manure can be successfully integrated into a WRRF for bioplastics production without compromising WRRF performance.Diversifying the WRRF products portfolio is a strategy to maximize resource recovery from wastewater while concurrently achieving environmental sustainability.
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This content will become publicly available on November 1, 2026
Evaluation of Methods to Quantify Sialic Acid on Glycomacropeptide
Glycomacropeptide (GMP) is isolated from whey and used as an ingredient in phenylketonuria-safe foods because it does not contain phenylalanine. GMP is highly glycosylated and has several sites where N-acetylneuraminic acid (NANA) is bound. In the dairy industry, quantification of NANA from dairy proteins is accomplished by colorimetric, fluorometric, enzymatic, and chromatographic procedures; there is no uniformly accepted industry-wide standard method. In this investigation, NANA quantification methods were evaluated using GMP, and a comparison was made based on the length of time to complete the assay, protein-specificity, linearity, precision, and accuracy. From the methods evaluated, the chromatography protocol was determined to have the greatest benefit for use as a dairy industry standard to measure NANA on GMP. The average mass percent of NANA in 10 statistically independent replicates from a commercial GMP product was measured to be 6.18% ± 0.12%, with a relative standard deviation of 1.94%, which was the lowest of all the methods tested. The accuracy of the chromatographic approach was validated using spike and recovery experiments that provided an average recovery of 90.25%.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2345069
- PAR ID:
- 10649820
- Publisher / Repository:
- MDPI
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Foods
- Volume:
- 14
- Issue:
- 22
- ISSN:
- 2304-8158
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 3939
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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