Substances relevant to the recovery of nutrients from waste and wastewaters in sustainable fertilizer documents include elements and nutrient standards, nitrogenous substances used as fertilizer components, and phosphates. The use of sewage sludge to generate both fertilizer and biogas or energy, the manufacture of biochar and its supplementation for use as a fertilizer and soil amendment, and the need for combinations of methods are important issues in the recovery of nutrients from waste. Given that phosphate rock is a limited resource and using it to make phosphorus fertilizers is a highly energyand chemical-intensive process our search of CAS content discovered trends in journal research and patenting are in recovering forms of phosphorus from wastes, wastewaters, wastewater treatment sludges and incinerator ashes. Recoverable phosphorus forms included struvite, which is really a multinutrient fertilizer obtainable as magnesium ammonium phosphate or magnesium potassium phosphate. Biological methods for wastewater treatment to recover nutrients such as struvite are discussed in a majority of publications; physical methods such as osmosis and filtration are discussed in a smaller number of publications, while fewer yet discuss chemical methods such as precipitation. In the narrower subset of wastewater treatment methods for recovering struvite, biological methods predominate, but chemical methods make up a significantly higher proportion of publications than for nutrient recovery from wastewater as a whole. The number of publications on biological and physical methods for wastewater nutrient recovery increased until 2017 and fell; the fraction of documents that were patents decreased as well in 2017. Articles involving biological methods for wastewater nutrient recovery most commonly discussed wastewater treatment sludge. Documents on physical methods discussed a variety of methods, including absorptive methods, filtration, settling, separation, flocculation, and osmosis, with absorption predominating in methods for struvite recovery. Documents invoking chemical methods also peaked in 2017, but the fraction of patents did not decrease. A variety of absorbents were discussed, with carbon, metal oxides, and minerals discussed most often.