The amount of excess sludge produced in municipal wastewater treatment plants in Japan is increasing every year as the urban population increases. Phosphorus in excess sludge could be a potential phosphorus resource since at present, phosphate rock is being exhausted all over the world. Every year, Japan imports large quantities of phosphorus from abroad but much are discharged as excess sludge. Therefore, solubilization process, one method of recovering phosphorus from sludge, could be a promising solution. In this study, subcritical water process, a new technology that solubilizes sludge under subcritical condition, was applied before the phosphorus in sludge was recovered with magnesium ammonium phosphate (MAP) process. As a result, the solubilization rate of excess sludge achieved approximately 80% and about 94-97% of the phosphorus could be recovered.Keywords Subcritical water; Solubilization; Excess sludge; Resources recovery; MAP process Introduction Activated sludge (AS) process is the most commonly used biological treatment process for municipal wastewater treatment plants all over the world. However, one of its major disadvantages is the high production of excess sludge. Every year about 2000 million tons of excess sludge are to be treated in Japan, accounting for approximately 48 % of the total amount of industrial solid waste, and this number is still increasing with the increase in urban population (Environmental white paper, 2005). Although recently, excess sludge is being increasingly used for soil amendment or construction materials, this part takes only about 45 % of the total, and the residual part has to be dewatered, incinerated and then landfilled. Because the area for landfill is becoming less and less available in Japan, new treatment methods and disposal technologies, as well as effective utilization, are strongly expected. In this study, a new method of applying subcritical water to hydrolyze and solubilize excess sludge, as shown in Figure 1, was examined. In addition, UASB process for methane recovery and MAP process for nitrogen and phosphorus recovery from the solubilized excess sludge were also investigated.