The European ACCELWATER project is underway with an important Catalan participation

On November 1, 2020, the European ACCELWATER project “Accelerating Water Circularity in Food and Beverage Industrial Areas around Europe” began.

On November 12, 2020, the “Kick Off Meeting” of all project participants was held virtually.

This project has a European grant of the call H2020-LOW-CARBON-CIRCULAR-INDUSTRIES-2020 with the theme CE-SPIRE-07-2020 (preserving water: recycling industrial water from industries).

https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/958266

The project consortium is made up of 18 participants from different European countries: Greece (leader), Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Iceland and Catalonia.

Until 2024, the aim is to optimize the use of water in different types of food industries in Europe (sectors involved: meat, beer, dairy, processing of tomatoes and fish farms) where various pilot tests will be carried out with all types of solutions.

Therefore, the main goal is to optimize water consumption in the food and beverage industry and to optimize energy consumption in order to treat wastewater. Wastewater and by-product optimization technologies will be introduced within a food sector, or looking for synergies between different types of water waste from various food products.

Work will be done on recovery, reuse and artificial intelligence solutions and control technologies in order to monitor and allow the use of recovered water in food and beverage manufacturing processes. At the same time, it will reduce energy consumption and optimize, recover and manage this energy. Consequently, an improvement in environmental and socio-economic sustainability can be achieved.

INNOVACC participates together with other partners in the cluster, UVic and Mafrica, which make up the Catalan part of the project.

In the case of the pilot tests of the meat sector, to be carried out in Catalonia, it is intended:

• Improving water quality
• Increase the amount of water recovered and reused
• Produce energy from biomass
• Reduce waste from the meat industry
• Valorize waste to produce high value-added products.

Innovacc within project will contribute to replicate the business models and the technologies developed and tested to different companies of the sector meat. It will also support the communication and dissemination of the results obtained (both for the meat sector and for other food and beverage sectors). At the same time, the cluster will prepare digital publications and organize different conferences in different parts of Spain in order to disseminate the project and that it has repercussions, above all, on the European meat sector.

The following is the budget and approved aid from the catalan part of the project:

The approved budget and global aid are:

Overall budget: 9.429.670,00 €
Overall aid: 8.115.787,38 €