ACCIONA Agua heads a European project to improve the removal of chemicals in treated wastewater

The BRAINYMEM (“Advanced-control MBR for wastewater reclamation”) research project, headed by ACCIONA Agua, has been selected by the European Commission to be part of the LIFE+ program due to its potential for improving the quality of treated wastewater and reducing treatment plants’ energy consumption. The project will be carried out in ACCIONA Agua’s pilot plant in the wastewater treatment plant at Almuñécar (Granada) and its results will be extrapolated to other plants.

This project will improve the elimination of the so-called ‘emerging contaminants’… remains of compounds like pesticides, medications such as antibiotics/hormones, etc. that are not completely removed by using conventional treatment systems. ACCIONA was already a pioneer in research into the elimination of emerging contaminants and endocrine disruptors through projects like HYDRA, which made progress in the application of combined technologies using biological membrane reactors and nanofiltration and/or inverse osmosis; SÍSIFO, focused on the development of new advanced oxidation photo-chemical technologies for water disinfection, and NANOBAC, developing new materials that can be used as catalysts in photo-catalytic processes to degrade contaminants.

The BRAINYMEM project will also reduce the energy consumption of wastewater treatment plants through the application of an advanced control system, achieving a 25% reduction in a plant’s power consumption.