PerFORM WATER 2030 @ ECOMONDO 2019

On Tuesday 5th November in Rimini at ECOMONDO 2019, the international fair specialized in the green and circular economy which has reached its twenty-third edition this year, CAP Group hosted "Living labs: uno strumento di innovazione per società water-smart", an event dedicated to the PerFORM WATER 2030 project.

Living labs: an innovation tool for a water-smart society

To introduce the meeting, two speeches respectively by Professor Francesca Malpei of Politecnico di Milano (scientific coordinator of the project) and by Alfredo Pizza from the Research and Development Department of CAP Group, who briefly summarized the most relevant features of PerFORM WATER 2030 and highlighted how the project's living labs set up a meeting place where stakeholders in the water sector work together to develop innovative solutions to face the current challenges of the public urban water, creating synergy between skills and roles, with the aim of developing technologies and practices on both pilot and full scale.

The meeting continued with a series of presentations by the project partners, grouped into four themes:

The challenge of emerging contaminants: while scientific research continues in order to understand the actual risk represented by these compounds, in the PerFORM WATER 2030 project sustainable solutions are developed for their removal from wastewater through advanced treatments that can be integrated in conventional purification chains

Circular economy from wastewater: wastewater is a mine of resources, starting from the regeneration of the same water, up to the production of energy and recovery of matter. The PerFORM WATER 2030 project works to lay the foundations for this vision of a sustainable future, demonstrating the effective applicability of different innovative approaches in a real context

Digitization at the service of the water networks of the future: the living lab of PerFORM WATER 2030 is the ideal place to experiment innovative digital tools in facing the current challenges of the aqueduct and sewerage networks, whose effective application requires a strong change of perspective on the part of the managers of the water service and the synergistic action between the stakeholders involved

The reduction of environmental impacts in wastewater treatments: innovation in the water sector also means doing the usual job better, improving the performance of the treatment plants and reducing the impacts generated, so as to increase the overall environmental, social and economic sustainability of the whole public water sector