NextGen, FHNW School of Life Sciences

NextGen will demonstrate innovative solutions for water in the circular economy in ten demonstration cases across Europe. The circular economy transition driven by NextGen encompasses a wide range of water-embedded resources:

1. water reuse at multiple scales supported by nature-based storage, optimal management strategies, advanced treatment technologies, engineered ecosystems and compact/mobile/scalable systems
2. energy recovery by combined water-energy management, treatment plants as energy factories, water-enabled heat transfer, storage and recovery for allied industries and commercial sectors
3. material recovery by nutrient mining and reuse, manufacturing new products from waste streams, regenerating and repurposing membranes to reduce water reuse costs, and producing activated carbon from sludge to minimise costs of micro-pollutant removal

The FHNW School of Life Sciences will deliver a comprehensive economic assessment of defined system configurations with specific technologies and processes in place using inputs provided by the case studies. Direct and indirect effects of NextGen processes and services will be analyzed and quantified. Depending on data availability, complexity and system maturity, life cycle costing (LCC) and circular economy assessment (CEA) will be performed in different levels of detail.

EU project website