We need water for everything: for our personal use, to grow food, and to produce virtually all the goods required for our survival. Although water covers about 70% of the Earth’s crust, we can rely on only 10% of all rainfall available for personal, agricultural and industrial use. Globally, the water demand per capita has increased over the last 25 years to 19,804 m3/person per year and it is projected to increase by 55% globally by 2050, which is higher than total currently available water supplies in the respective catchment areas. In this context, the reuse of wastewater could overcome this challenge satisfying the growing global water demand. Nowadays, only an 11% of the global freshwater withdrawals, released into the environment as wastewater, is submitted to an adequate treatment for reuse. The MEMBIO project arises as a result of many years work, experimenting and developing a new revolutionary membrane technology for wastewater treatment. Our company presents a technology based on microbial fuel cells (MFC), which emerges as a strong candidate to satisfy sustainably the water requirements, where the current technology in water treatment underperform. The operational and financial feasibility assessment have allowed us to fix a price of 180 € per unit and an investment needed to reach a go-to-market stage for MEMBIO project of € 1.5 Mil. The water and wastewater treatment market, was valued at € 534 bn in 2016 and it is expected to growth at a CAGR of 4.2% from 2017 to 2025 driven by the rising demand of freshwater for drinking, industrialization and agriculture. In this context, MEMBIO will play an essential role based on its potential cost reductions and improved performance versus the current treatment systems. We have evaluated three possible economic scenarios for our financial projections, considering different combinations of commercialization through our company or a distributor. Our MFC will be profitable even under the most pessimistic scenario we have analysed. The more realistic case will provide a ROI of 325% in 3 years. Hence, the positive feedback obtained from the feasibility study have encouraged us to apply for EC funding through Phase 2, which is aimed at completing the large-scale industrial production plan, MFC prototype construction and testing stages required before we are able to sell our solution to costumers within the wastewater treatment sector at international level.
