About the project
AquaVal is framed in the subtopic in Challenge I the "water reuse and water recycling technologies in the agriculture and freshwater aquaculture sectors", with clear relation to other challenges and subtopics and the European Strategy on Bioeconomy. AquaVal aims to the development of technological solutions for the treatment of water used in freshwater aquaculture facilities. The technological solutions will be combined to comprise a full treatment system, to remove pollutants and valorise effluents following the circular economy precepts. Treated water will be obtained with quality for recycling/reuse to the producing facility or discharge into natural water sources. This system will include the application of biological treatment technologies where biomass is grown in the form of granules and enriched in microbial populations able to remove nutrients and micropollutants. Application of new processes, which are less energy requiring, will be evaluated like: a) anammox, which takes place in nature in large extension, or b) microalgae in association to bacteria. In this way nitrogen will be removed from the water in systems different from biofilters used nowadays, with the advantage that carrier material is not required for biomass support, and that less energy is required. With the output water from the previous described technology, a bivalve filtration unit will be kept, in order to test bivalves growth capacity improving the efficiency of proposed system, thus taking advantage from their filtration ability. This water depuration step will be accomplished using adults bivalves from the wild but, eventually could also be used for rearing endangered species of freshwater mussels in Spain, promoting biodiversity protection and endangered species conservation. Validation of the pilot plant will be performed to evaluate the economic, environmental and production performance of the proposed system.
The expected general benefits for aquaculture systems coming from this proposal are:
- Economic benefits derived from the decrease of water consumption when treated water is used for recycling and the use of systems that are less energy demanding;
- Improvement of the social perception of aquaculture plants as they will profit from new technologies that will reduce their environmental impact;
- Reduction of the environmental impact of discharging aquaculture effluents.
The proposal involves as beneficiary participants 3 universities (Universidade Católica Portuguesa-UCP, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela-USC, University of Torino-DVS) and 1 company (Grupo TresMares-GTM) which will cooperate closely with stakeholders to achieve the project main objective.
