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Themes
The ECWRTI project sets a leading industrial example by demonstrating the scale-up of the EColoRO concept that allows to close the water cycle in the textile industry, achieving an unprecedented sustainability performance.
Incentive
Global freshwater availability is under permanent stress. Of all water available on our planet only 2,5% is potable fresh water of which most is present in ice caps. A mere 0,3% is directly available for consumption. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has calculated that due to increasing population the global water consumption will rise dramatically over the coming years, leading to an increasing stress on available freshwater sources, increased local drought risks and reducing the availability of potable water for consumption.
The European Environment Agency states that about 44 % of total water abstraction in Europe is used for industry and energy production and only 15 % for public water supply. From the industrial water consumption approximately half is used as cooling water for energy production while the other half is predominantly used for process and manufacturing industries in chemicals, food and feed, paper and pulp, oil and gas, textile, metals, minerals and mining sectors.
The EColoRO concept slashes both water consumption and costs using environmentally responsible technologies
Objective
The ECWRTI project brought a new technological concept to the market that closes the waterloop by separating the water, organometallics and salty brine and creating a produced clean water that can be fully re-used.
The EColoRO technology has two major advantages: it enables textile mills to reduce fresh water consumption by up to 90 percent, and it lowers their wastewater treatment costs. Other advantages include relatively low energy consumption, no additional chemicals, and no required changes to existing processes. EColoRO’s innovative approach integrates electrocoagulation with systems that are already being used in industrial applications, accelerating the step to commercial market implementation when the project completes.
The ECWRTI consortium consisted of seven partners from SMEs, end-users, research institutes and textile confederations from four EU countries with the Institute for Sustainable Process Technology as project coordinator.
See the ECWRTI publications for public deliverables and other project related articles. For more information: contact us.
ECWRTI project was finalized in 2019. Final results, conclusions and recommendations of the project are available in the ECWRTI White Paper.
