This study investigated the recovery of N, P and K from source-separated urine in laboratory-scale combined processes of air stripping and precipitation. Two operation scenarios were carried out to recover N/P (named partial scenario) and N/P/K (named complete scenario). Most of the nutrients were recovered (>70%) by optimising the operation parameters including the increase of air flow rate and more dosages of the sources of Mg and P. Absorbent rich in ammonium sulphate and solid precipitates including struvite, struvite-K, and struvite-Na was produced. The simultaneous recovery of P and K was the key process to determine the substance input. The ratio of substance input to nutrient recovered (P2O5 and K2O) was 4.14 in the partial scenario, whereas it increased to 10.61 in the complete scenario. The inevitable co-precipitation of struvite-Na mainly responded for the lower economic efficiency of the complete scenario.

This study developed a new process that stably produced ammonium nitrate (NH₄NO₃), an important and commonly used fertilizer, from the source-separated urine by comammox Nitrospira. In the first stage, the complete conversion of ammonium to nitrate was achieved by comammox Nitrospira. In this scenario, the pH was maintained at 6 by adding external alkali, which also provided sufficient alkalinity for full nitrification. In the second stage, the NH₄NO₃ was produced directly by comammox Nitropsira by converting half of the ammonium in urine into nitrate. In this case, no alkali was added and pH automatically dropped and self-maintained at an extremely acidic level (pH 3-4). In both scenarios, negligible nitrite accumulation was observed, while the final product of the second stage contained ammonium and nitrate at the molar ratio of 1:1. The dominance of comammox Nitrospira over canonical ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) and nitrite-oxidizing bacteria (NOB) was systematically proved by the combination of 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing, quantitative polymerase chain reaction, and metagenomics. Notably, metagenomic sequencing suggested that the relative abundance of comammox Nitrospira was over 20 % under the acidic condition at pH 3-4, while canonical AOB and NOB were undetectable. Batch experiments showed that the optimal pH for the enriched comammox Nitrospira was ∼7, which could sustain their activity in a wider pH range from 4 to 8 surprisingly but lost activity at pH 3 and 9. The findings not only present an application potential of comammox Nitrospira in nitrogen recovery from urine wastewater but also report the survivability of comammox bacteria in acidic environments.