Department Urban Water Management

The Aqua Urbanica symposium, co-organised by Eawag, explored the question of what is needed to implement the sponge city concept. With the help of this concept, cities should be able to mitigate the consequences of climate change.

New technologies in the water sector can contribute to the flexible and sustainable development of urban water management and the sustainable utilisation of water as a resource. In a recent article in the journal Aqua & Gas, a team of researchers from the aquatic research institute Eawag shows what opportunities and risks are associated with this.

Eawag researchers Wenzel Gruber and Urs Schönenberger have won this year's Otto Jaag Water Protection Prize for their dissertations. Reducing emissions of the climate-damaging nitrous oxide from wastewater treatment plants and reducing the leaching of pesticides from drainage systems are the topics.

No tiger duck and no football club - the formula "yellow-black-grey" refers to the separation of wastewater streams at their source, i.e. at the toilet, washbasin or shower. This opens up new possibilities and saves resources. On the occasion of World Toilet Day on 19 November, a series of Eawag fact sheets shows how this can be done.

What has been a purification process in wastewater treatment plants for decades can also be used decentrally or semi-centrally as a recycling process for nutrients. Early separation of "solid and liquid" plays a key role here. It allows for flexible solutions in terms of process technology, especially in the treatment of urine. New studies also show that the processes can be used not only for human urine, but also for that of cows or pigs.

The Wings Research Programme explores alternative, decentralised sewage systems and brings actors from the areas of research, politics, authorities, urban planning, and engineering and architectural firms together.  The objective is to promote innovations in the water sector and find ways to create a sustainable and flexible future for wastewater.

With the support of Eawag, experts from the VSA platform "Process Engineering for Micropollutants" investigated the inputs of substances from industry and commerce into waterbodies. The nationwide analysis shows that treated wastewater from businesses also contains micropollutants that enter waterbodies.

Moritz Gold and Aryeh Feinberg have been awarded the 2021 ETH medals for their outstanding doctoral theses. The topics of the two dissertations were the utilization of organic waste for breeding the larvae of the black soldier fly, and the modelling of atmospheric sulphur and selenium cycles.

With around 200 pictures and texts, the new Water Timeline takes you through 200 years of the eventful history of Swiss water protection. It aims to show how shifts towards more sustainable management of natural resources can be shaped. 

Researchers Christoph Vorburger and Florian Altermatt talk about the importance and state of aquatic biodiversity in Switzerland and Eawag’s commitment to conserving natural biodiversity.

The separation toilet save! has won the Design Award Switzerland 2021. This is also a milestone for Tove Larsen. She is a member of the Eawag Directorate and has been researching for almost 30 years how the nutrients in wastewater can be recovered in a useful way. In this interview on the occasion of World Toilet Day 2021, she explains how crucial our handling of wastewater is for climate change and for achieving the SDGs sustainability goals.

Together with a team of researchers and designers, Kai Udert has designed a toilet system that makes it possible to recycle nutrients from wastewater on-site. As a result, valuable nutrients can be recovered and used as fertilisers so that they no longer end up in lakes and oceans where they do a lot of damage. Now he wants to make the system ready for market together with industry partners.

A new EU project is building bridges between experts from academia and industry in the field of urban drainage. The aim of the project is primarily to make local research infrastructure available to partners throughout the EU – including Eawag's urban water observatory (UWO) in Fehraltorf.

The environmental chemist Barbara F. Günthardt and the two environmental engineers Matthew Moy de Vitry and Marius Neamtu are awarded the ETH Medal for their doctoral theses. Plant toxins, urban flooding and complicated flows were the topics. Congratulations!

Heatwaves and heavy local rainfall will increase with climate change, pushing traditional urban drainage systems to their limits. These problems can be addressed using the blue-green infrastructure approach. With careful planning, solutions of this kind can also increase biodiversity and improve the quality of urban life.

An Eawag study has shown that it makes good sense to recover domestic energy, for example from warm shower water. The study refutes concerns that this form of heat utilisation could have a negative impact on waste water treatment plants. In fact, utilising the energy closer to its source reduces energy losses in the waste-water system.

Open Science is an important development in science - open access to the results of research. Eawag supports these and makes a growing part of its research data, including descriptions, images and even software, available publicly and free of charge on the Eawag platform ERIC or, in special cases, on discipline-specific, international databases. ERIC complements the long-standing platform DORA for scientific publications.

In the Water Hub, our scientists are researching sustainable and decentralised wastewater treatment. Here, wastewater is not regarded as waste, but as a resource. Now the research platform in NEST can be visited virtually at any time.

With the latest analytical methods, potentially toxic substances can be detected even at very low concentrations. However, the aim of research is not merely to document such contamination but also to understand how it occurs in streams and groundwater, and to propose mitigation measures.

Online biomonitoring systems offer the possibility of real-time monitoring of wastewater with organisms and enable wastewater treatment plant operators to react immediately to acute pollution in wastewater. So far, however, very little information is available on the suitability of online biomonitoring systems for such monitoring. An applied project by Eawag, the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland and the Oekotoxzentrum is now set to change this.

The motto of today’s World Water Day is “Valuing water – What means water to you?”. With this motto, the United Nations wants to raise awareness of the vital importance of water and call on people to think about the value of water. In an interview, Eawag Director Janet Hering explains the importance of water for the aquatic research institute Eawag and also her personally.

Monitoring of wastewater samples has the potential to provide a further indicator – alongside the number of cases, hospitalisations and deaths – to track the course of the pandemic. With support from the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH), an existing research project is now being expanded from two to six wastewater treatment plants.

A new fact sheet highlights the opportunities and challenges associated with greywater.

Matthew Moy de Vitry has been awarded the ETH Zurich Otto Jaag Water Protection Prize for his doctoral thesis “Public surveillance and the future of urban pluvial flood modelling”.

The mobile and automated MS2field mass spectrometer allows measurements to be taken of harmful substances in surface waters with high temporal resolution. The initial measurements using the device are revealing the extent to which peak concentrations of pesticides, for example, have been underestimated by traditional methods.

At Eawag, the aquatic research institute, numerous scientists are conducting research into toilets. In short videos, seven of them explain what fascinates them about the topic and what exactly their research is all about.

The new digital tool PlaNet makes it easier for municipalities to identify important project partners but also critical voices in complex environmental and infrastructure projects. In this way, it helps them to set up participatory processes in a professional manner.

Circular economy also holds great potential when it comes to wastewater. At NEST, Eawag is conducting research on decentralized wastewater treatment with the aim to use wastewater as a source of nutrients, energy and water. Important partners are Keramik Laufen AG with the urine separation toilet "Save!" and the Eawag Spin-off Vuna with the liquid fertilizer made of urine "Aurin".

Adaptation to warmer environmental conditions may increase the resistance of viruses, making them harder to be inactivated. This is the finding of a new study involving Eawag. Global warming could therefore make it more difficult to combat viruses.

Process Engineer Adriano Joss from Eawag water research institute has been working for many years on wastewater treatment plants and the removal of micropollutants from water. Together with Ralf Kägi, Head of the Eawag Particle Laboratory, he has compiled the current status of knowledge on microplastics. In an interview, he presents the most important findings. We have recently posted detailed information on the website “Microplastics in the environment”.

Nature Sustainability has just published a review article on possible risks that COVID-19 viruses could cause in wastewater. Prof Eberhard Morgenroth (Head of the Eawag Department of Process Engineering) is a co-author of the review. We asked him five questions.

Four young researchers from the department SWW received an “Early Postdoc.Mobility fellowship” from the SNSF to broaden their scientific profile abroad: Mariane Schneider, Lena Mutzner, Omar Wani and Matthews Moy de Vitry. The four have already worked together as a team during their doctorate and have published, among other things, a review for the future of water management.

Thanks to a new instrument, water pollutants can be measured automatically over a period of weeks – directly in the field, rather than in the laboratory. The mobile mass spectrometer is housed in a trailer and can be remotely controlled by smartphone.

126 Swiss researchers, including 6 from Eawag, want to draw the attention their Swiss compatriots to the scientific evidence showing the link between the emergence of pandemics and human disturbance of the natural environment.

The novel coronavirus has been successfully detected in wastewater – even at low concentrations, in samples collected at an early stage of the outbreak. Researchers at EPFL and Eawag are now working to optimise the method. The aim is to develop a system which could warn of a resurgence of cases earlier than clinical diagnostic tests.

Researchers want to make use of the fact that coronaviruses excreted by infected individuals can be found in wastewater. If the viruses can be detected successfully, this may provide a much faster way of spotting a wave of infections than via testing of symptomatic individuals. To find out more, we interviewed Eawag researcher Christoph Ort.

Precipitation varies substantially in terms of location and time. With climate change increasing this variability, urban stormwater systems are also affected – not least in Switzerland. How exactly their performance may change has been investigated by Eawag researcher Lauren Cook in the dissertation she has written at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA).

Eawag and the Eawag spin-off Vuna have made urine fertiliser production mobile. Today, the Urine Express will be presented at a very special location in Biel: next to the first public grass tennis court in Switzerland. In future, the tennis court is to be fertilised with urine fertiliser.