On the 12th of December 2024, the AquaSPICE project celebrated its Final Conference in Brussels, bringing together partners, stakeholders, and experts to present its ground-breaking contributions to reduce freshwater intake through circular water reuse.
The event opened with inspiring messages from project coordinator Thomas Wintgens, Professor at the RWTH Aachen University who set the scene of this incredible day, thanking everyone for their participation. He highlighted how the project has contributed to reducing the current use of freshwater resources, making steps towards closed-loop systems in industry and recovery of water and energy.
Keynote speeches highlighted the European Union’s strategic priorities, including the Circular Economy Act and Industrial Decarbonising Accelerator Act. The project showcased innovations such as a real-time monitoring platform, a water cyber-physical system, and process suite modelling, all implemented across five case studies.
Dimos Paraskevas from HaDEA highlighted AquaSPICE’s alignment with Horizon Europe’s research goals, while Andrea Rubini of ASPIRE-P4Planet underscored the A.SPIRE Process4Plante Partnership as key for a holistic approach in advancing sustainability across process industries.
The project showcased innovative solutions that were successfully implemented in five real-world case studies. These included:
– A real-time monitoring platform
– A water cyber-physical system
– Process suite modeling
– NEWASYS and industrial synergies.
AquaSPICE’s impact is undeniable, achieving reductions in freshwater consumption, steps toward closed-loop systems, and significant recovery of water and energy resources. Case Study leaders took the floor to showcase the main achievements and results of the AquaSPICE innovations.
“This project solves real problems and delivers tangible services” noted George Arampatzis from the Technical University of Crete, who shared key outcomes from AquaSPICE’s innovative journey.
During the conference, Loic Charpentier from Water Europe announced the AquaSPICE policy brief ‘The Benefits of a Digital and Holistic Approach based on a Water-Smart Industrial Symbiosis for a Competitive Industry‘. From the document, the project’s main policy recommendations are:
– Provide a holistic approach by breaking the existent silos to empower cross-domain decision-making and enabling industries to share data;
– Provide incentives to facilitate the integration of digital monitoring systems in water-smart symbiosis practices
– Foster the interoperability and accessibility of the data in order symbiosis to enable circular economy and process symbiosis strategies
AquaSPICE Final Conference was organised by Water Europe, back to back to the Water Knowledge Europe 2024 conference.
