SUWANU EUROPE celebrates its first anniversary in Rome

The 2^nd General Meeting of SUWANU EUROPE took place on 23^rd and 24^th of January in Rome.

During this event all the partners of the consortium met to present the work carried out during the first year of the project and discuss about the following steps. The meeting was held in Rome at the beautiful facilities of Confagricoltura, one of the Italian partners of SUWANU EUROPE.

This general meeting was also attended by relevant actors of the regional working groups of the project. Carlos Benitez from EMGRISA, a Spanish company focused on the environmental conservation and water treatment, presented the DSEAR Plan, the National Purification, Sanitation, Efficiency, Savings and Reuse Plan for Spain. This is an initiative from the Ministry for the Ecological Transition of Spain (MITECO) which its main objective to achieve in this plan is to review the intervention strategies designed in the second cycle hydrological plans, in five major areas: purification, sanitation, efficiency, savings and reuse. Nikolay Mihalkov from the National Water Association of Bulgaria talked about the water treatment sites that are currently running in Plovdiv. Another interesting intervention was the one that Konstantinos Kotoulas from EYATH S.A. (Greece) made. He presented and specific and successful example of reuse of water: the water treatment site of Thessaloniki. Luigi Tozzi from Confagricoltura introduced how to mitigate and adapt to the climate change effects on agriculture.

The consortium also enjoyed with the presentation of an External Advisory Board (EAB): Giacomo Giannoccaro from the University of Bari. He offered his economical point of view to deal the problems related to the introduction of the reclaimed water technology into the market.

Regarding the general aspects of the project, during this meeting the main outcomes achieved within the Work Package 1 were presented. These consisted on the SWOT and AKIS analyses developed for each one of the SUWANU EUROPE regions. Another great achievement was the participatory workshops included in the Work Package 2 and held in the different regions during the last year. The stakeholders could meet the objective of the project and discuss about the problems elated to the use of reclaimed water. Furthermore, the partners talked about the future tasks that must be developed such as the finalization of the action plans for each region.

Some of the activities that will be also done in the future months are included in the Work Package 3 which aims to transfer project materials and results, using attractive channels for the “users”, adapting knowledge to their language and format and having real impact. These activities are the factsheets, the design of online courses and the organisation of training workshops.

To finalize this event, an open discussion took place which was introduced by Diego Berger from MEKOROT (Israel). He presented the reflexions after the first year of the project and offered their experience in the reclaimed water field.