Utilization of Industrial Wastes as Fertilizer

산업폐기물(産業廢棄物)의 비료화(肥料化)

An increased population and rapidly expanding industrial development have led to enormous amounts of various domestic and industrial wastes. The proper disposal of ever-increasing wastes is a growing global problem. Land treatment is one of the rational approaches that are environmentally safe and economically practical. It has long been practised in many sites. Recycling of industrial wastes on agricultural land can provide better possible means for maintaining environmental quality and utilizing waste-resources. Even though industrial wastes are beneficial as soil amendment and fertilizer, they have some limitation on land application because of wide variability as well as physicochemical problem in their composition. A direct application of solid and liquid wastes on land is being practised in Korea and some experimental results are presented. The direct application of fermentation waste on rice resulted in a 6 percent yield increase. Another organic residue from glutamic acid fermentation is widely used not only as a direct application as a liquid fertilizer but also for a raw material of organic compound fertilizer. These wastes are much promising as sources of plant nutrients, since they have large amounts of nutrients, especially nitrogen with few toxic metals. On the other hand, fertilizers developed from inorganic industrial wastes include calcium silicate, calcium sulfate and ammonium sulfate. The calcium silicate fertilizer simply produced from slag, by-product of iron and steel manufacturing plant is one of the most successful example of the conversion of wastes to fertilizer and slag production capacity totals to over three million MT/year. About 200,000 MT of calcium silicate fertilizer is currently applied in the paddy rice every year. Calcium sulfate, a waste from the wet phosphoric acid process is to some extent used as a filler of compound fertilizers but quite large quantites are directly applied for the reclamation of tidal flat.