Sewer Mining for Urban Water Reuse

Sewer Mining is a concept that is gaining traction, end is considered an innovative way to address water scarcity. It extracts wastewater directly from the sewer network treats it on- site and produces water for on-site use. The technology is applied by the installation and testing of a sewer mining modular unit for urban green irrigation at the point of demand which is clearly of direct benefit for the sustainability of urban water management. To address resource efficiency issues in e circular economy context, compost-based eco-engineered growing media are also produced and reused as onsite fertilizers and thermal energy recovery schemes are investigated to minimize the pilot’s environmental footprint. These technologies are applied and tested for the first time in Greece in a real-world application, and the results aim to serve as a significant step towards transferable, modular, scalable and circular solutions. The main stakeholders and beneficiaries of the practice are water companies, industry, specialized SMEs, applied research institutes, city and regional authorities. Considering the main end-products of the system designed and implemented, new end-markets can be reached through the development of synergies. Public authorities can close the circle by providing new support services based on such energy-water-material management systems. Consequently, such services are not available at the time of the project implementation and refer to future actions.