Archive News

April 3, 2020 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.

February 27, 2020Precipitation 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).

February 17, 2020Eawag 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.

November 19, 2019It's World Toilet Day today. What may sound curious is intended to draw attention to a serious problem. Because worldwide, one in three people lack access to appropriate sanitation. In the Blue Diversion Autarky project, researchers are developing an off-grid toilet, with on-site treatment allowing valuable resources to be recovered.

October 30, 2019What developments do urban water researchers and professionals see as important – or worthy of scepticism? A pioneering horizon scan conducted by Eawag scientists indicates that, for this community, digitalisation is a particular concern – in a positive and negative sense. In this interview, Frank Blumensaat, an environmental engineer at ETH Zurich and Eawag, discusses the opportunities and risks it creates in the urban water field.

October 23, 2019One of the most popular drugs in Central and Southern Europe is cocaine, according to the new European drugs report. In Eastern Europe however, it’s methamphetamine — more commonly known as crystal meth — that is the drug of choice.

September 17, 2019Implementation of the Montreal Protocol has successfully prevented depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer and associated increases in levels of UV-B radiation at the Earth’s surface. But many questions remain to be answered – for example, how does climate change affect the exposure of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems to UV radiation? This is one of the questions discussed in a review article, co-authored by former Eawag scientist Barbara Sulzberger, which was recently published in Nature Sustainability.

September 10, 2019Treating community wastewater takes a lot of energy. Eawag is currently supporting a project that not only presents an alternative to conventional treatment processes but is also designed to enabled increased throughput within a smaller amount of space.

September 4, 2019The 3RCC award has been conferred on two Eawag researchers by the 3R Swiss Competence Centre (3RCC) for their outstanding research work. For the first time ever, the researchers managed to obtain ISO certification for a toxicity test using cultured fish gill cells, thanks to their project work in this area. This represents a milestone in the promotion of alternatives to animal experiments. The prize was awarded on September 2nd in Bern.

September 3, 2019The energy strategy calls for a further expansion of hydropower. This puts pressure on Swiss water bodies and water landscapes. At today's Eawag Info Day, some 200 experts from practice, research and administration will discuss how the various interests in water can be met in a sustainable manner and where the competition between these interests calls for priorities to be set. The Eawag researchers will demonstrate that it is not only a question of technical solutions, but also of social acceptance, for example when measures in favour of water ecology lead to an increase in the price of electricity.