USW wins funding to tackle water treatment from household waste

The University of South Wales (USW) has been awarded £50,000 to work with an Australian university to look at how water can be recovered and reused from household waste. 

USW and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) have been awarded the money from the Universities UK International (UUKi) Rutherford Fund Strategic Partner Grants programme.

The successful project is WATERS: Welsh-AusTralian EnviRonment partnerShip: Municipal Waste Treatment 2050 - Maximising Resource Recovery with Zero Energy Input. It is a partnership between the Sustainable Environment Research Centre (SERC) at USW and the Centre for Environmental Sustainability and Remediation (EnSuRe) at RMIT in Australia. 

The project will develop an international platform to tackle some of the challenges of water treatment and resource recovery from municipal waste streams. A Research Fellow from RMIT will spend a year working with the SERC team at USW. The project will identify the most effective biorefinery approach to using municipal bio-waste streams by modelling a range of technology options.  

Professor Alan Guwy, Head of SERC, said: “Biorefineries are complex systems that enable the flexible production of a range of sustainable products. The focus of the research of this UUKI funded project will be to evaluate a number of process technologies being developed at USW to optimize the many possible treatment, conversion and recovery scenarios.  

“These scenarios will include the selection of appropriate feedstocks and their blending ratios, improvements of the technical unit operations, and identification of a product portfolio with the most significant marketability."

The Universities UK International (UUKi) Rutherford Fund Strategic Partner Grants programme provides funding for UK higher education institutions to offer short-term fellowships that will build on and enhance their global strategic partnerships. The fellowships are funded by the UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) through the Rutherford Fund, with the aim of attracting global talent and strengthening the UK's research base.