Newsletter December 2020

Water JPI on the Bluetech week

Blue Tech Week BTW2020 is the annual event where hundreds of international participants gather in San Diego to highlight collaboration and innovation. Organized by TMA Blue Tech, each year, Blue Tech Week brings together companies, institutions, and policymakers.

For its 12th annual Blue tech week, the overall theme was “AquaOptimism™, BlueTech & SDGs”. The UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals and its plan of action for people, planet and prosperity guided this 12th Blue Tech Week. TMA BlueTech also embraces the idea of AquaOptimism™ - to think positively about the future of our water systems and provide forward thinking solutions to the current problems.

The different panels focused on innovation, collaboration, globalization and sustainability to bring together academia, government, and industry. The event showcased innovative companies from around the world bringing Ocean and Water solutions to a variety of markets.

This year, it was held virtually. The Water JPI participated to two panels, one on the Starfish Mission of Horizon Europe, and the other one about Funding Opportunities for Water Tech.

For the Funding opportunities, the 230 people who attended virtually the event had the opportunity to ask questions about funding innovation, public-private partnerships, technology transfer and capacity building. Water JPI stressed that multidisciplinary approaches are important to build the future, and that training people to grasp these approaches is essential for our future and AquaOptimism™.

Progress on water JPI

Pharmaceuticals in the environment: AquaticPollutants expected to contribute to the EU Strategic Approach to reduce their adverse effects

The European Commission has published on 2^nd December 2020 an overview of the progress made in implementing the actions of the Strategic Approach to Pharmaceuticals in the Environment. This strategic approach presented last year aims to counteract the negative effects of pharmaceuticals on the environment, covering their whole lifecycle from design and production through use to disposal. Findings show that overall, good progress has been made so far, and some actions presented in the strategy are already well advanced or have even been completed.

The remaining actions are to be achieved through several European Green Deal initiatives, as well as the Pharmaceutical Strategy adopted on 2^nd December 2020. These Green Deal initiatives include actions that will play a role in reducing the environmental footprint of pharmaceuticals, especially the Chemicals Strategy for Sustainability , the From Farm to Fork target on reducing the EU sale of antimicrobials for farmed animals and in aquaculture, and the forthcoming Zero Pollution Action Plan . Other initiatives, including the 8th Environment Action Programme to 2030, the Circular Economy Action Plan for a cleaner and more competitive Europe and the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, set a framework for generating an overall shift to a production and consumption of resources, materials and chemicals, which is safe and sustainable by design and creates the lowest possible impact on the environment, including pollutants of emerging concern.

The overview shows that implementation of some actions is already quite advanced:

The revised Surface Water Watch List, under the Water Framework Directive, was adopted in August 2020 and included additional pharmaceuticals. This watch list functions as an early warning system for pollutants in surface waters.
Legal acts are currently being drafted under the Regulation on veterinary medicinal products, which aim to promote a more prudent use of antimicrobials in animals, and implement a wide range of concrete measures to fight antimicrobial resistance.
New guidelines on hazardous household waste have been developed. Pharmaceuticals are also being considered in the impact assessment for the potential revision of the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive.
The last Land Use and Coverage Area frame Survey (LUCAS soil survey) sampled pharmaceutical concentration and antimicrobial genes in soil, with results expected in 2022.
The EU has started work with Member States’ health ministries, for instance to ensure health professionals consider environmental impacts of medication.
In the research arena, the ongoing Horizon 2020 programme is co-funding with Member States solution-oriented research, such as AquaticPollutants Call which is expected to fill the knowledge gaps on the contaminants of emerging concern, pathogens and antimicrobial resistance development in aquatic ecosystems.

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DropletsProgress on water JPI

18th "Europe-INBO 2020" International Conference for the Implementation of the European Water Directives

Progress on water JPI

Final conference of AGRINUPES projet

Progress on water JPI

Bloowater Project: Supporting tools for the integrated management of drinking water reservoirs contaminated by Cyanobacteria and cyanotoxins

Cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, can rapidly proliferate forming visible blooms under favorable environmental conditions, and release toxic secondary metabolites (cyanotoxins) into the water during their senescence and death.

Periodic blooms of cyanobacteria are common in a wide range of water bodies, in Europe they include fresh waters (natural lakes, rivers, ponds, artificial reservoirs and canals) and brackish waters (the Baltic Sea, estuaries, and lagoons).

Exceptional and prolonged cyanobacterial blooms are increasingly detected in lakes and reservoirs in Europe and throughout the world due to anthropogenic emissions of nutrients and climate change. Therefore, the excessive presence of cyanotoxins forming the so called Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) in freshwater reservoirs can pose serious risks to human health and activities, aquatic wildlife, domestic animals and also livestock.

For example, in humans cyanotoxins can cause skin irritations after contact and illness if swallowed such as headache, gastroenteritis, and even attack the liver and the brain.

Cyanobacteria occur in waterbodies in all 29 European countries, for example in Italy 12 regions out of 20 are affected by this phenomenon (Figure 1).

Fig1. .jpeg

Lake Albano during an algal bloom in February 2020

To preserve drinking water and human well-being, effective risk assessment and management strategies need to be planned particularly considering all possible routes of exposure for human beings.

Researchers from Italy (ENEA, UNIVPM), Norway (NIVA) and Sweden (UU) are working together at the WJPI BLOOWATER project, in the effort to develop a low-cost methodological approach based on the integration of monitoring techniques and treatment of drinking water affected by toxic blooms caused by Planktothrix rubescens.

BLOOWATER will integrate innovative methodologies into a multisensor platform to improve water quality through the development of effective low-cost and functional measures into prompt and opportune intervention procedures for efficient and sustainable management of the water resources.

The methodology will be implemented and tested in four lakes, Lakes Erken and Mälaren in Sweden and lakes Albano and Castreccioni-Cingoli in Italy, that are the pilot areas where to carry out the data sampling and test cyanotoxins monitoring and forecasting models under real conditions.

ENEA and UPPSALA University are working to a monitoring system development.

A satellite/drone integrated monitoring system has been defined to combine water sampling and remote data in order to implement and test an early warning system.

The acquisition of remote sensing data will be done from Sentinel-2 satellites.

Sentinel 2 will provide multispectral data for monitoring water surface condition variability, with a high revisit time (with 2 satellites under cloud-free conditions it results in 2-3 days at mid-latitudes). The sensor mounted on the drone is a triple-band multispectral filter camera, the Survey3, Mapir Inc. (figure 2)

The water samples are processed in the laboratory for the analysis of nutrients (nitrogen compounds and phosphates), study of the phytoplankton population and measurement of the total chlorophyll concentration by Phyto-PAM-Phytoplankton & Photosynthesis Analyzer (Heinz Walz GmbH, Effeltrich, Germany); as well as filtration and extraction of photosynthetic pigments and spectrophotometer analysis.

Drone flying on lake Albano in November 2020

As a part of the TREATMENT PROCESS COMPARISON activities, UNIVPM and NIVA are conducting tests to assess the appropriateness of using membrane treatment to remove cyanobacteria and their cyanotoxins from contaminated raw water sources instead of conventional treatments such as coagulation, flocculation and filtration that cause cells breaking and cyanotoxins release. Coagulation and flocculation, moreover, require the use of chemicals such as Aluminum sulphate.

NIVA is assessing factors that are believed to determine the removal efficiency and process stability of nanofiltration (NF), a much-applied treatment system (i.e. reference technology) when producing drinking water. Due to the different characteristics and properties of the many variants of cyanobacteria and cyanotoxins, the influence of factors such as pH, presence of natural organic matter (NOM) in the water and in/on the membrane as well as membrane characteristics (pore size and hydrophobicity/hydrophilicity) will be studied using selected cyanobacteria and cyanotoxins. NIVA also assess how the cross-membrane flow rate and the membrane operating pressure may influence the release of intracellular cyanotoxins during treatment.

In parallel to the NF tests, UNIVPM continues the development and testing of the polymer enhanced ultrafiltration (PEUF) system in bench scale.

In the recent years, the complexation-ultrafiltration technique has been shown to be a promising technique for removal of pollutants from water. In particular, the polymer enhanced ultra filtration (PEUF) using natural polymers such as Chitosan can be a novel alternative to treat waters polluted by cyanobacteria reducing both, the equipment and the treatment costs.

In this research, NIVA will contribute with biofouling tests using the long channel membrane test cell (LCMTC) system (Figure 1) specifically developed for such studies. They will, among other factors, assess how the pre-coagulation step influences the fouling rate and the removal efficiencies of selected cyanobacteria and cyanotoxins.