The progressive industrialization and urbanization along with climate change have seriously affected global water resources thereby threatening human health .
Among other contaminants, the heavy metal ions and metal cyanides of both natural and industrial origins are particularly harmful because of their non-biodegradability and long biological half-lives. These metals tend to accumulate in different body parts of the living organisms thereby causing severe diseases and disorders.
The water quality at the EU level are regulated through different Directives, imposing stringent requirements to the industrial and municipal waste water treatment plants with reference to the quality of the water discharged into surface-water, groundwater, and water-intake.
Additionally, in certain countries, (e.g. Germany), further local regulations are being implemented, to force industries decreasing or even avoiding any pollutant emission (close loop water re-cycling).
To comply with these regulations, industrial and municipal water treatment plants introduce secondary and tertiary treatment technologies, based on several energy demanding and chemically polluting processing steps, which jointly guarantee for optimal purification of the waste water.
In the PureWater project we address 2 different heavy metal water pollution sources: natural and anthropogenic through filtration membranes produced with patented technology.
Natural pollution is caused by the heavy metals naturally present in the Earth´s crust. When penetrating into drinking water, under certain conditions these metals become highly toxic, genotoxic, and carcinogenic, even in very low concentration if consumed over long period of time.
The anthropogenic heavy metal pollution is caused by industrial activities, above all the electroplating industry , as metal finishing involves several chemically enhanced techniques like cleaning, coating, plating, anodizing etc., that generate wastewater containing compounds and cyanides of Chromium, Gold, Zinc, Cuprum, Lead and Cadmium.
Our ambition is to become the global landmark in the water treatment technology, introducing a bio-based, universal, yet simple, cheap and scalable technology for water decontamination.
The PureWater’s mid-term ambition is to overcome all persisting challenges of water purification without requiring any modification of the existing pipelines: i) household purification of drinking water; ii) purification of industrial wastewater streams; iii) decontamination and purification of water contaminated from heavy metals and nuclear waste for agricultural purposes.
The overall objective of the feasibility study is the definition of the value proposition of the Pure Water technology, based on in-field trials to be carried out at the premises of several water treatment plants.
To this scope, during the 6 months of the project, different trials in real industrial conditions were run. Specifically:
- an extensive trial at large municipal water treatment company in Italy
- a comprehensive trial at a Swiss industry producing waste water containing heavy metals
- an early trial at a Hospital facility in Switzerland to test the removal capacity of radioactive metals
All the above trials have demonstrated the unprecedented capacity of the PureWater membranes to filter target metals from any feed water.
The result of the above studies have shown that, unlike to all the state-of-the-art technologies, PureWater membranes have the skill to efficiently (100% filtration) adsorb multiple heavy metal ions in a single step, without the need to post- or re-processing.
In fact, the market enquiry carried out during the Phase 1 project has demonstrated the general interest of the stakeholders toward the Pure Water technology.
However, to achieve the full industrialization of the membranes, several technological objectives are required to be reached, such as engineering of an infrastructure that can be accepted by all the water treatment plants, was well as the delivery od a diversified portfolio of products, based on the same working principle of the PureWater membranes, but formulated in a granular solution so to meet the requirements of the users willing to use alternative filtration methods.
These objectives are intended to be reached under SME Instrument - Phase 2 project.
