Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SuPER-W (Sustainable Product, Energy and Resource Recovery from Wastewater)
Reporting period: 2018-03-01 to 2020-02-29
In total, the ESRs participated in 7 network-wide training events and workshops and a closing conference, in addition to the training they received in their local home and host institutions. All ESRs conducted a mandatory internship in the non-academic sector and a secondment of at least 6 months in the university that co-awards their double/joint PhD degree. Furthermore, they contributed to several outreach activities and tools, including a massive open online course (MOOC) on resource recovery from wastewater, the development of a workshop with didactical material on electrochemical resource recovery from water treatment, which they demonstrated for a group of school children in Peru, and a workshop for pupils on water, sustainability and resource recovery. In their research, the ESRs of SuPER-W tackled some major challenges towards making product, energy and resource recovery from wastewater more efficient. Technological challenges dealt with included the optimisation of transformation processes, concentration and separation, removal of unwanted compounds, and translation to low-tech environments. Non-technological challenges concerned enhanced exploitation of research results and translation of science into policy. The research programme was mainly technology-oriented, but significant attention was also given to the identification of (regulatory/economical/technical) bottlenecks in the implementation and exploitation of (novel) resource recovery technologies in Europe, stakeholder involvement, policy input formulation, the development of new business cases and industrial, urban, and mixed urban-industrial ecosystems, and assessment of the environmental, economic and social sustainability of wastewater treatment and resource recovery technologies. Two early-stage researchers focused specifically on these aspects.