On November 1, 2020, the European ACCELWATER project “Accelerating Water Circularity in Food and Beverage Industrial Areas around Europe” began. The project consortium is made up of 18 participants from different European countries: Greece (leader), Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Iceland and Catalonia.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

The food and beverage industry is one of the most water- and energy-intensive industries in the world in addition to producing large volumes of waste. Therefore, freshwater supplies are in high demand. Despite significant progress in improving water use efficiency, the food and beverage sector needs to do more to minimise the use of freshwater during the processing of raw materials. However, current solutions for wastewater treatment in industries under a water–waste–energy nexus remain limited. The aim of the EU-funded AccelWater project is to change this pattern and improve freshwater consumption in the food and beverage industry by focussing on developing novel water reclaiming and reusing as well as artificial intelligence-enabled monitoring and control technologies.

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 the 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.