A product for the elimination of micro-pollutants from wastewater is the Total Winner of the Aquatech Innovation Award 2025.
Aurea from consulting engineers Royal HaskoningDHV was developed within the Netherlands, and its choice for this award adopted an unbiased evaluate led by jury chairman Professor Cees Buisman, Scientific Director of Wetsus, a European centre of excellence for sustainable water expertise.
Because the organizers clarify: “The Aquatech Innovation Award recognises world-class improvements and applied sciences which have the potential to disrupt the worldwide water market. Acknowledging these improvements and the newest technological developments, this 12 months’s awards acquired a excessive degree of entries.”
Aurea was developed in collaboration with Wageningen College to sustainably take away micro-pollutants from water in wastewater therapy vegetation, ingesting water manufacturing websites, and industrial wastewater therapy vegetation. It’s mentioned to mix one of the best properties of organic activated carbon filtration and oxidative therapy, assembly the targets of the European City Wastewater Therapy Directive (UWWTD).
This permits it to take away a variety of natural micro-pollutants, utilizing decrease power and useful resource consumption when in comparison with reference applied sciences, leading to low CO2 footprint and operational bills, in line with Aquatech. Aurea achieves excessive chemical and organic water high quality.
Chemical and medicinal residues remaining in wastewater and returned to nature can have a big unfavourable influence on biodiversity. The UWWTD has put wastewater therapy vegetation on the forefront of eradicating these chemical substances and so the problem is to discover a method to do that in essentially the most environment friendly and pure method potential.
Jury chairman Professor Cees Buisman mentioned: “What you need with organic sewer therapy is that the method is as near being pure as potential, as a result of the water will probably be returned to nature. What impressed the jury was that Aurea goals to satisfy these targets.”
He added: “The pilot makes use of activated carbon, which is continually regenerated by the biomass. Then a bit of little bit of ozone is added to keep away from the formation of bromates. That is as near a pure course of as potential and utilizing activated carbon and ozone in a accountable and good method.”
He concluded: “It has the potential to be a billion-dollar market and Aurea matches into this essential problem for European society.”
Judging for this 12 months’s awards was primarily based on originality, practicality and sustainability. A typical theme amongst entries was a concentrate on energy-efficiency and sustainability, significantly round PFAS focus and destruction.
Buisman added: “Being a part of Innovation Awards has all the time been pleasure. Our water expertise group by no means stops shocking me with its capacity to provide you with new improvements, whether or not they’re small enhancements and even typically massive steps.”
“It’s a constructive signal that innovation and invention proceed within the water trade, with lots of the entries positively shocking the skilled jury.”
One of many rising traits witnessed by the jury this 12 months was Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and particularly new improvements to scale back the power wanted to destroy them.
