Grant: Canada Research Chairs

Globally and in Canada, municipal and industrial wastewater treatment plants have evolved over decades around conventional design concepts, which emphasize the reduction of organic carbon, suspended solids, nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) and pathogens. As a result, these end of pipe processes only reduce environmental consequences of treated wastewater discharges to receiving waters, and are energy intensive and costly to operate and maintain. Dr. Yang Liu’s research strives to develop future water services that are more economic, health-protective, and environmentally friendly, allowing ecosystems to restore and supporting the circular economy. A fundamental feature of this innovation comes from treating wastewater as a resource, as there is considerable value in recovered energy, nutrients as well as water for reuse that also provides greater resilience to climate and demographic changes. Key opportunities exist to dramatically improve wastewater resource recovery efficiency through improved understanding of how microbiomes adapt to their engineered environments and developing controllable links between microbial community metabolic profiles and resilience. Dr. Liu’s research team is working to address these opportunities, focusing on addressing issues associated with the efficiency and scalability of existing resource-recovery based wastewater treatment technologies through a quantum step change in understanding how biological treatment microbiomes can be adapted for robust high performance. This program will adopt novel omics and machine learning tools, link functional microbial groups with engineering parameters, and develop resource-recovery based treatment from novel source-diverted blackwater and greywater systems, as well as municipal wastewater collected in conventional sewers. Key outcomes from Dr. Liu’s research will include improving bioreactor design and operation to reduce overall footprint, enhancing process resilience, and better integrating knowledge to ultimately improve operations and controls, which will address current economic limitations for resource-recovery processes and strive for net-zero goals within both centralized and decentralized community systems. Significant advances for Canadian communities are expected by reducing carbon emissions, improving resource recovery efficiency and process stability, reducing microbial risks at critical control points, and protecting source water quality for future generations.