Collaboration and opportunities for future water and sludge management

Tuesday, April 23, 2019 - 10:47

Swedish national dissemination event was held in Kalmar, Sweden, on 10 April 2019 organized by Environment Engineering and Scientific Group at Linnaeus University. The seminar, Collaboration and opportunities for future water and sludge management: focus on IWAMA project, brought together 25 participants from local municipalities, authorities, waste water treatment plants, private companies and academy. The seminar aim was to promote IWAMA project's results and to be able to build new opportunities for collaboration in important research areas: wastewater recycling and recycling of sewage sludge and prevention of the most critical harmful particles in the WWTP collection system. The seminar gave participants an extended understanding of the sewage sludge and the water issues, the most important challenges and opportunities.

Participants showed great interest to learn more about using and saving water. Also to take more responsibility for water resources. It was great to see a lot of innovation and technical suppliers who work with water issues. One of the most aspects is education for water and sludge management topics and issues where knowledge is in focus. WWTP Game is a good step forward in successful training on child and youth level. Major challenges are still EU rules and economic sustainability, but EU support is important and it works.

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IWAMA project is built on cooperation to find future solutions for sludge treatment, recycling metals from sludge/wastes and re-use of the substances that are important for agriculture. It is another important step to clarify significant environmental methods which give the most back in the circular economy.

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In addition to this, the participants discussed the most critical bottlenecks with regards to improving water treatment and recycling with main emphasis on incentivizing behavioral change. These new thoughts and ideas resulted in the creation of future potential sub-projects such as:

Upstream work for harmful particle prevention.
Water recycling – different quality of water based on type of usage.
Sludge quality – how to certify the quality of sludge in addition to already existing and often expensive systems such as Revaq in order to increase the usage of sludge as a fertilizer.
Leachate water treatment – New innovative systems and experiences.