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This summer we have published two massive project works: reports on key figure data collection in energy and sludge from wastewater treatment plants in the Baltic Sea Region.

The work on the comparative benchmarks in energy efficiency and sludge handling continued throughout the IWAMA project coordinated by the partners from Technical University of Berlin and University of Tartu supporting respectively the energy and sludge focuses of smart wastewater management. With data collected from more than 65 WWTPs around the Baltic Sea Region, the universities evaluated energy consumption, information about the loads to be treated and treatment efficiency, general inflow parameters and overall sludge treatment situation. The answers were collected from Sweden, Finland, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus and Germany.

The report discovered how WWTPs operate under different legal requirements and diverse restrictions regarding nutrient effluent values. While there is no clear region-based dependency, several factors influencing plants’ performance can be identified: the age of WWTP and installed equipment, motivated and well-trained staff in combination with the availability of financial resources devoted to upgrading of WWTPs, and constrains of national legal requirements or offered financial benefits. Particularly, for the sludge data, the report demonstrated how the applied treatment technologies varied depending on a country, as national legislation towards sludge usage is very different influencing chosen technologies.

The reports on key figure data support water sector professionals in the Baltic Sea Region providing general information on the regional situation, technical details on the processes applied in the region, and supporting decision-making process. Benchmarking of the status of wastewater treatment plants helps in detecting possible performance gaps that can be further improved.

Read more about the process of data collection and evaluation, and check the graphs demonstrating the technologies applied in the region and the effectiveness of wastewater treatment in the publications available online: