TreatRec · Interdisciplinary concepts for municipal wastewater treatment and resource recovery. Tackling future challenges

Interdisciplinary concepts for municipal wastewater treatment and resource recovery. Tackling future challenges

The TreatRec project offered an innovative training programme in the technology, chemistry, process engineering, modeling and decision support systems, as well as business and entrepreneurial skills, provided by leading experts from academia and industry. Network-wide training was complemented by research training through an individual scientifically ambitious research project generating young professionals that: • Have an understanding of science, policy drivers, technological solutions and the social science aspects associated with the monitoring and treatment of wastewater; • Have experience of working on and delivering a research project that is aimed to meet the real needs of industrial sector; • Have formal training in business skills (including project management, IPR, commercial exploitation of research results) . The core idea of the TreatRec project is the collaboration between industry (ATKINS and AQUAFIN) and academia (Catalan Institute for Water Research-ICRA and University of Girona) where the two sectors work together to identify research questions. Through this communication the project has identified five main technological and knowledge gaps around which the research programme has been built. Specific scientific objectives of the TreatRec were the following: • To evaluate technological feasibility and cost-effectiveness of several advanced treatments focusing on nutrient recovery and removal of emerging contaminants • To improve scientific understanding of the fate and behavior of understudied emerging microcontaminants during wastewater treatment • To identify the role of each treatment unit within a wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) related to the microcontaminants removal, nitrogen and phosphorous recovery or removal with energy consumption, reliability and performance levels • To investigate the stress conditions that trigger periods of poor wastewater treatment performance in the context of both present day and future scenarios • To identify the resilience and robustness of the evaluated technologies against changes of environmental conditions • To encapsulate process knowledge acquired in the project in the form of a decision support system that will allow decision makers to make more qualified decisions

Data: CORDIS, © European Union