AQUACIRCLE

Fit-for-purpose cascaded-approach for water and resource recovery from food industry wastewaterFood industry produces large amounts of wastewater with significant contents of organic carbon, nutrients and added-value compounds at low concentrations that can be recovered following a cascaded approach based on a specifically designed sequence of technologies. However, the diversity and seasonality of industrial wastewater streams, i.e. in terms of composition, concentration, temperature, etc. represents a challenge for the recovery of water and resources since the technical solutions suitable for a given stream or for an industrial site might not be well adapted to the specificity of another one. Wastewater management with the goal of resource recovery must be tailored for every single industrial site matching the characteristics of each stream, the potential valorization technologies, the needs of the site and its region. This project aims at providing a leap forward in the circularity of water and resources in food industry by the development of technologies for recovery of water, nutrients and carbon from wastewater. These cutting-edge technologies will be integrated in a decision support tool to propose specifically tailored cascaded approaches that maximize the recovery of water and resources, matching the needs of each site and region.