The successful technology to extract struvite from wastewater developed by researchers Prof. Juan M Garrido and Dafne Crutchik, (former BioGroup researcher, now professor at the Adolfo Ibáñez University of Santiago de Chile), won the “Fernando Calvet Prats” Technology Transfer Award, given by the Royal Galician Academy of Sciences and the GAIN Agency (Xunta de Galicia).

Legislation requires phosphorus to be removed from water in WWTP, but it is possible to recover and reuse it as a useful material. Among the components of phosphorus, struvite stands out as a mineral highly appreciated in the EU as an agricultural fertilizer.

This technology, which has two patents (Spanish and European), was successfully transferred to the company Aqualia. The “Fernando Calvet Prats” Technology Transfer Prize, worth 5,000 euros, jointly rewards the research group that created the transferred technology, in this case, the Group of Environmental Biotechnology (BioGroup) of USC and the winning company, Aqualia.

The awards ceremony took place on June 19 at Pazo de San Roque in Santiago de Compostela.