“Prospects for Biological Nitrogen Removal from Anaerobic Effluents during Mainstream Wastewater Treatment” named as ES&T Best of the Best in 2015
Manuscripts submitted to ES&T Letters undergo several rigorous technical reviews, first by an Associate Editor and then by multiple external reviewers, to ensure that these studies are of the highest scientific quality. From those papers that pass our technical review, we accept for publication only those studies that also warrant urgent publication. As a result, the papers published in ES&T Letters are of both quality and of great immediate interest to our readers. Among these excellent papers, the editors of ES&T Letters enjoy recognizing a few papers that particularly stand out among those we published in the past year. For 2015, we identified four studies that merited inclusion in our awards for “Best Papers”. For these awards, we do not select our papers from specific topical categories, and we do not rank them in any order (other than sometimes listing them in alphabetical order). We also have no fixed number of papers that will receive this special level of recognition. The papers chosen from publications in 2015 span several important topics, ranging from chemicals in groundwater and air to cleaning up used water for further use or discharge into the environment.
The energy used in the United States for our water infrastructure is estimated to consume 3–5% of the electricity we generate, a level that is clearly not sustainable. One way to reduce the carbon footprint of wastewater treatment is to use anaerobic technologies, avoiding the need to aerate the wastewater. However, nutrient removal remains a great challenge for anaerobic treatment technologies. J. Delgado Vela, L. B. Stadler, K. J. Martin, L. Raskin, C. B. Bott, and N. G. Love reviewed available technologies in their critical study of emerging techniques Prospects for Biological Nitrogen Removal from Anaerobic Effluents during Mainstream Wastewater Treatment. They concluded that development of effective nitrogen removal technologies will require the development of sensor-mediated controls, improved computational models, and improved removal efficiency relative to reducing energy demands [Environ. Sci. Technol. Lett.2015, 2 (9), 234–244, DOI: 10.1021/acs.estlett.5b00191 (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.estlett.5b00191)].