Wageningen University participates in the EU-funded SWITCH (Sustainable Water management Improves Tomorrows Cities’ Health) project, that was launched on Sunday 18 March at the World Water Forum in Mexico. SWITCH will develop scientific, technological and socio-economic solutions that contribute to an effective urban water management scheme. It deals with challenges linked to urban sprawl in metropolitan areas – namely, the quantity and quality of water, ineffective sanitation systems, poor governance and costly water management.
Wageningen University is theme coordinator of the urban sanitation component in the SWITCH project and will work on new concepts for wastewater management. Conventionally, urban wastewater is collected in gravity sewers and transported to central treatment facilities outside cities or in the urban periphery. This centralized system cannot cope with shrinking availability of water and other resources in large parts of the world. Current sanitation process trains also suffer from storm water overflows, produce polluted municipal sludge and an effluent out of compliance with the EU Water Framework Directive.
Various research and demonstration initiatives are currently in progress in Europe to investigate promising new concepts of urban sanitation. Several alternative process trains, aiming at closing the environmental loop at neighbourhood level, have been developed and piloted in the past decade.
Within Wageningen University, two groups will work on SWITCH. The Urban Environment group (www.ue.wur.nl) will, over the next five years, assess the field performance of experimental sanitation process trains. The sub-department of Environmental Technology will work (www.ete.wur.nl) on the development of feasible technologies to remove medicine residuals and endocrine disrupters from concentrated wastewater flows like urine and black water.