About Phosmag Group

Dr. Sergey Lubanov has been engaged in struvite research since his undergraduate years in Russia, where his 2007 PhD thesis was also devoted to the subject. In 2008, he continued his struvite research in Germany as a visiting researcher, and in 2009 he participated in a major international conference in Vancouver, Canada, where he met many leading global scholars in the field, including researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC). In 2010, Sergey joined the UBC research team and spent the next eight years developing struvite-related technologies.

Upon his departure from UBC in 2018, Sergey met Bob Shen in Vancouver. A serial entrepreneur who made his fortune in fashion, agriculture and fishery products, Bob immediately recognized the potential of struvite recovery technology. Bob and Sergey founded a new venture dedicated to further developing and commercializing the technology which became the MINEPHOS prototype. Following initial R&D efforts in 2019, they launched their first commercial-scale pilot project in Jiangsu Province (Nantong, Hai'an), recovering struvite from the liquid portion of chicken manure. The innovative process was patented in the United States in 2022 and subsequently in multiple other jurisdictions worldwide, with a total of 21 patents granted or pending.

In 2023, they completed another pilot project in Jiangsu Province (Yancheng, Dafeng) to extract struvite from pig manure biogas slurry, including solids. Currently, PHOSMAG's MINEPHOS technology is being commissioned at the Bailonggang Wastewater Treatment Plant—the largest in Asia—where struvite is being recovered from municipal sewage sludge, and a few large scale commercial sites in China. PHOSMAG is the leading firm in the world that can recover struvite at scale from a wide variety of waste streams such as livestock and poultry manure, sewage sludge, various industrial wastewater streams, etc., and deliver recovered struvite in granule form globally.