The Science and Technologies for Phosphorus Sustainability (STEPS) Center, headquartered at NC State University, has been awarded nearly $22.5 million in follow-on funding by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF).

“Our university sits at the intersection of several important research realms working to solve complex societal problems,” said Krista Walton, NC State’s vice chancellor for research and innovation. “STEPS is a perfect example of how we put our engineering and agricultural expertise to work for a cleaner environment and a more secure global food supply.” 

The new five-year award follows the $25 million in funding that established STEPS, which was one of only six NSF Science and Technology Centers to launch in the Class of 2021.

When STEPS launched, its partner institutions initially included Arizona State University, Appalachian State University, the Joint School of Nanoscience and Engineering at North Carolina A&T State University and UNC-Greensboro, the University of Florida, Marquette University, RTI International, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Since then, STEPS has added two additional partners — Clemson University and the University of Arkansas. 

In its first five years of operation, the center also: 

• Developed A Roadmap Toward US Phosphorus Sustainability, which outlines nine key areas of opportunity to reduce dependence on mined phosphates and losses of phosphorus to the environment by 25% each in the next 25 years;
• Supported several groundbreaking research projects; and
• Engaged over 110 graduate and undergraduate students, as well as 21 postdoctoral researchers — with a total of 54 from NC State. 

“While only the beginning, in our first five years STEPS has already enabled revolutionary research discoveries to address today’s grandest challenges, while also fostering the next generation of researchers who’ll play an essential role in solving the problems of the future,” said Jacob Jones, director of STEPS, a Kobe Steel Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and NC State’s associate vice chancellor for research initiatives.

Phosphorus: An Essential Element

The chemical element phosphorus plays a critical role in agricultural fertilizers as well as a range of industrial applications. 

Among the most notable results of STEPS-funded research is an inexpensive hydrogel that can filter phosphorus from contaminated surface waters, drinking water supplies or wastewater streams to reduce phosphorus pollution and reuse the phosphorus for agricultural and industrial applications. 

Kirill Efimenko and Jan Genzer, STEPS researchers in NC State’s Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, discovered how to capture — and reuse — wasted phosphates, which could simultaneously make fertilizer both more cost-efficient and environmentally friendly.

Most of the fertilizer that farmers spread never reaches their crops. Much of it ends up in runoff water or is absorbed in soil. This eventually leads to higher phosphorus levels in surface waters — which contribute to significant water-quality problems like eutrophication.

“Phosphorus is essential for plant growth, but the natural runoff from agricultural fertilizers can cause environmental damage to waterways, not to mention increasing expenses for farmers,” says Ross Sozzani, co-deputy director of STEPS and a professor in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology. “Our convergent research teams are working on ways to not only reduce but potentially even reuse this phosphorus runoff.”

The vast majority of phosphorus used for farming and industrial applications comes from mining operations, which rely on limited resources and can pose environmental problems. 

“The idea of filtering phosphorus from contaminated waters is not new, but existing technologies rely on potent acids or bases to release the phosphorus once it has been captured,” said Genzer, a co-corresponding author of the hydrogel research, in a news release about a paper on the work. “Ultimately, this poses environmental challenges of its own and makes it expensive to harvest phosphorus using filtration technologies. We have made major strides toward solving this problem.”

In addition to the environmental concerns, reliance on phosphorus mined almost exclusively by a few foreign countries presents a significant risk to the U.S. economy — and national security. 

The U.S. Geological Survey included phosphate, the most common agricultural form of phosphorus, on its most recent list of critical minerals, released in November 2025.

A Fragile Global Supply Chain

Global phosphate mining is highly concentrated, with a small number of countries dominating supply — namely China and Morocco. Combined with the fact that phosphate rock is a nonrenewable resource, this concentration makes the phosphorus supply chain inherently fragile.

On June 29, the White House issued an official proclamation reaffirming that “[f]ertilizers are an essential component of agriculture and food production” — and recognizing that “[g]lobal supply chains for phosphate fertilizer and fertilizer inputs, including imports of such products into the United States, have been disrupted in recent months by, among other things, conflicts in fertilizer-producing regions as well as trade actions taken by major fertilizer-producing countries.”

The June 2026 “Declaration Of Emergency And Authorization For Temporary Duty Free Importation Of Phosphate Fertilizer From Morocco” followed an executive order issued on Feb. 18, invoking the decades-old Defense Production Act to protect domestic supply chains. 

“Elemental phosphorus is pervasive in defense supply chains and is therefore crucial to military readiness and national defense. It is a key input in smoke, illumination, and incendiary devices and is a critical component for manufacturing the semiconductors that are central to numerous defense technologies, such as radar, solar cells, sensors, and optoelectronics,” the February executive order stated. “It is also increasingly important in modern lithium-ion battery chemistries used in a multitude of weapon-system supply chains. For these and other reasons [in November 2025], the Department of the Interior … designated phosphate as a critical mineral.”

From a supply chain perspective, the STEPS-supported hydrogel technology’s biggest advantage is the opportunity to reuse captured phosphorus several times over. 

“Our experiments suggest the hydrogel would be able to remove well over 90% of the phosphorus from wastewater or contaminated surface waters,” said Genzer, the S. Frank and Doris Culberson Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at NC State. “We also demonstrated that we can reclaim up to 99% of that phosphorus for reuse.”

About the STEPS Center

Headquartered at NC State University and supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Science and Technologies for Phosphorus Sustainability (STEPS) Center is a convergence research community of diverse and leading scientists that addresses the complex challenges in phosphorus sustainability by integrating disciplinary contributions across the physical, life, social, and economic sciences. STEPS draws from atomic and molecular insights — such as chemistry, materials research, biochemistry and bioengineering — to develop materials and technologies for deployment at the human scale, including environmental and agricultural engineering, plant biology, crop and soil sciences, and more.

This post was originally published in Office of Research and Innovation.