Techno-economic analysis of resource recovery of glyphosate liquor by membrane technology

• A zero discharge process was proposed to recover acid, base and glyphosate. • A cost assessment of the recovery of glyphosate is presented. • Membrane technology is environmentally friendly to treat the glyphosate liquor.

A hybrid membrane process composed of NF and RO can be used to treat the glyphosate liquor of the IDA process. For treating the glyphosate liquor of the DMP process, this study proves that NF and BMED are feasible and cost effective choices. However, both NF and BMED are not yet applied on industrial scale for glyphosate liquor treatment. In view of NF treatment, the presence of phosphite (HPO2 −) in the mother liquor is a challenge to the membrane filtration because phosphite (HPO2−) could lead to severe membrane scaling and substantially reduce the membrane system efficiency and membrane service lifetime [14,36,38]. The membrane cost, especially for bipolar membranes, is the bottleneck for BMED to have large-scale applications. In terms of compliance with strict environmental regulations and the protection of natural resources, it can be deduced that a zero liquid discharge approach based on the membrane processes NF and BMED can be successfully used with glyphosate neutralization liquor. Acknowledgment The research was supported in part by the Public Welfare Project of the Science and Technology Committee of Zhejiang Province (2013C31038), the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (LY12B06008), the National Key Project of Scientific and Technical Supporting Programs Funded by Ministry of Science & Technology of China (NO. 2011BAE07B09), and the Opening Foundation of Zhejiang Provincial Top Key Discipline (ESE 20130101).