NEREUS
New Energy and REsources from Urban Sanitation
Priority Axis
Resource Efficient EconomySpecific objective
Circular Economy
Lead partner
VITO NVContact
Start Date
13/07/2017End Date
31/12/2021Project budget
7 007 864 €ERDF amount
3 394 737 €ERDF rate
48%About
Common challenge
The NEREUS project will tackle the common 2SEAS area challenges by boosting further the development of green economy and transforming wastewater into a valuable source of water, resources (eg cellulose, nutrients), and energy that could be reused.
More specifically, due to climate change, water scarcity is increasingly problematic resulting in a growing need to reuse wastewater. Finite nutrients such as phosphorus are crucial for agriculture and currently not recovered from wastewater. As a result, these resources cannot be reused in a meaningful manner (e.g. as fertilizer). Wastewater also contains energy / heat that could be used as a sustainable source of energy in order to reduce CO2 emissions. Although there is a growing conviction that future arrangements for the treatment of wastewater should be based on the principles of a circular economy, and although the technology is available, decision makers are still hesitant to make use of them due to the lack of practical evidence.
Overall objective
Main outputs
Cross border approach
Main Achievements
Despite unusual working conditions for most of 2020, the NEREUS partners kept up their efforts for the demo cases. Now, all demo cases are operational. Certainly DuCoop has made a huge progress. In May 2020, the residents of the apartments on the New Docks site (Ghent) moved into their new homes. Right after, the greywater treatment plant by NEREUS partner DuCoop became fully operational, purifying greywater from the apartments (wastewater from sinks, showers, baths, washing machines…). A few months later the heat pump was commissioned and the temperature of the treated effluent (20-30°C) was found to be well-suited to be recovered by the heat pump. In October, water utility company Farys started the piloting tests to reuse the treated water as process water by next-door soap factory Christeyns. So far tests have been promising and operations continue into the 1st quarter of 2021.
The New Docks demo also received international recognition in the past year: DuCoop reeled in 3 awards. Not in the least the Belgian prize in the Energy Globe Awards, the most renowned environmental prize worldwide. They also won the silver award in the category 'Business Process Award' in The European Business Awards for the Environment, for combining innovation, competitiveness and outstanding environmental performance. These medals are also awarded on a Belgian level (Belgian Business Awards for the Environment), where DuCoop was also honoured with the 2nd prize.
In recent months, Dutch partner Evides Industriewater made promising progress in exploring how the resource nitrogen can be extracted from wastewater. One of the tests examines adding a specific type of algae, since they feed on nitrogen and carbon dioxide, and produce the valuable blue pigment phycocyanine. As small-scale tests have provided sufficient insights, the algae cultivation has recently been upscaled to a photobioreactor (20 l) to optimise treatment conditions.
Towards the end of 2020, NEREUS knowledge partners HZ University and University of Portsmouth published a research article in the Journal of Environmental Management about the technical, environmental, economic and social key performance indicators (KPI’s) that can be used to quantify the benefits and the risks of resource recovery. Title: Mathematically formulated key performance indicators for design and evaluation of treatment trains for resource recovery from urban wastewater.