"The wastewater industry is sitting on a gold mine"

The header is probably overstated (a ton of gold was a value of around $64 million, the price of phosphorus is in the $600 to $700 per ton range), but keep in mind the investment community, especially hedge funds, are masters at spotting and then profiting from undervalued assets.  It is hard to find a more undervalued asset than water - unless you start to look at wastewater.  Adding another three billion people to the planet will put enormous strains on our agricultural systems - this includes the fertilizer components.  Wastewater treatment plants are resource rich - from reusable water to nutrients.  The hedge fund folks are seeing the same world - it is really only a matter of time, demographics, and shifting economics.

The quote is from an article in WSJ.Money that was in the Saturday edition - A Flood of Demand: High-end investors look for hot opportunities that preserve water and other commodities across the globe by Alyssa Abkowitz.  From the article:

"A less visible market is phosphorus, used in everything from fertilizer to toothpaste to each cell in your bodies.  Some investors, including Jeremy Grantham, who overseas around $117 billion at Boston-based firm GMO, have sounded the alarm on the element - not because there isn't enough of it right now, but because demand is expected to skyrocket, possibly leading to a shortage in as little as 20 years.  What's more, 85 percent of the world's phosphate rock reserves are controlled by Morocco, which, Grantham says, "is an odd situation.""

Also from the article:

"In the end, the most efficient use of (and investment in) a scarce resource may be in recycling it.  In Australia, the fifth-largest phosphate importer in the world, scientists are using remote sensing to find out exactly how much fertilizer crops may need to grow.  And in Europe and the U.S., researchers are looking into ways of recycling phosphorous found in animal and human urine.  Last year, for example, researchers at the University of Florida found they could extract 97 percent of the phosphates found in urine in about five minutes.  Says Cordell {Dana Cordell, research principal at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology in Sydney}: "The wastewater industry is sitting on a gold mine.""