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A national Swiss campaign has run every PFAS method in the Commission's guidelines side by side, and none of them can name most of the organic fluorine in wastewater.
A Stanford model shows that if neighbouring wastewater plants plan their nutrient removal upgrades together, capital and operating costs can fall by almost half.
Two new studies on artificial intelligence in anaerobic digestion reach the same sober conclusion: so far, AI predicts and advises, but nobody has yet shown it delivering more methane on a live plant.
The EU's wastewater directive makes producers of medicines and cosmetics pay at least 80% of the cost of removing micropollutants, but an Advocate General's Opinion has thrown the whole financing model into doubt.
The UK regulator has approved additional funding for infrastructure improvements at 13 water companies, but only five of them can raise customer bills between 2027 and 2030.
Using a two-step technology, researchers at Washington State University turn 83% of the carbon in sewage sludge into valuable, pipeline-quality renewable natural gas, while cutting treatment costs almost in half.
A few ways in which sewage sludge, the by-product of wastewater treatment, can be turned into a valuable raw material – though most are still at the experimental stage.
Research from Kazakhstan shows how a wastewater treatment plant can learn to think with the help of IoT sensors, hydraulic simulation and artificial intelligence.
Aeration in activated sludge tanks accounts for 50–65% of the total energy use of conventional biological treatment plants, the most common type worldwide. The efficiency of membrane diffusers is directly linked to a plant's operating costs.
The two main goals of the EU's Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive seem to contradict each other, but with the right strategy both can be met.