SYRACUSE — A team of students from the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) will use a $90,000 grant to study the marketability of fertilizer recovered from animal manure.

The graduate students, Doug Mayer, Fred Agyeman, and Lee Martin, won the two-year grant through the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) People, Prosperity and the Planet (P3) Student Design Competition for Sustainability. Martin earned his degree in December.

The ESF group was among 15 teams from universities around the country that received a total of $1 million in funding through the competition.

The ESF team focused on dairy manure, which is often used as a liquid fertilizer that can contaminate surface water and groundwater, according to the school. The students are developing a technology to recover the phosphorus and nitrogen in dairy manure and produce a solid fertilizer called struvite, says Wendong Tao, the students’ adviser and a professor in ESF’s Department of Environmental Resources Engineering.

The process uses another waste product, electric arc furnace slag, in production. The pellets created are a slow-release fertilizer that can be used for crop production, aquaculture, and horticulture, according to ESF.

Struvite has been created in the past from municipal wastewater, but never from the liquid manure that results from dairy farming, Tao says. He notes that’s one reason the EPA probably chose the ESF team for funding.

Struvite production prevents loss of nutrients from land to waters and helps generate revenue for farmers, according to ESF. It also helps address the depletion of phosphate rock used in fertilizer production.

Creating struvite from dairy manure will open a major market of phosphorus fertilizer in the future, the school says.

The winning P3 teams were chosen after participating in the 8th Annual National Sustainable Design Expo in Washington, D.C. Students showcased projects designed to protect the environment, encourage economic growth, and use natural resources more efficiently.

“The competition and expo are not only about EPA’s prestigious P3 award, but also about supporting the next generation of this country’s innovators and entrepreneurs who are entering the environmental and public health field with passion to make a difference and many brilliant ideas,” Lek Kadeli, acting assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, said in a news release. “The P3 program gives these students the opportunity to bring those ideas to realization and many have the potential to make significant impacts on our nation’s sustainable future and development of environmental technologies.”

The grant will allow the ESF team to implement its technology on a larger scale, Tao says. The team initially developed a system that can process about seven liters of liquid manure.

The next step is to create a system than can handle about 20 liters. The technology would need to be expanded even further for use on a commercial level, Tao says.

Dairy cows can produce about 138 liters of liquid manure per day, he notes. The team has plans to work with a dairy farm, Twin Birch Farm, in Cayuga County to test its technology further, he adds.