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The NWO has awarded over 5.3 million euros to six projects through the Open Technology Programme, including the research of Ludovic Jourdin to make products from CO2 and renewable electricity, based on a versatile acid. Apart from the NWO funding, companies and other organisations involved invest 1.1 million euros into the projects.

PhD candidate Edward van Dijk is defending his thesis on the Nereda® wastewater treatment technology today. He combined his doctoral programme with his work at Royal HaskoningDHV, where he is doing research into water treatment installations that convert wastewater into clean surface water.

Since last week, a large-scale demo installation in Lampedusa is producing drinking water, salts and chemicals from seawater in an environmentally friendly way. Project leader Dimitris Xevgenos: “This is the first time that we’re producing these marketable products at pre-commercial scale in Europe together with the right actors, including the use of waste heat. People can come and actually see it running.” 

The Dutch government has confirmed that it will allocate €60 million to support an ecosystem around cellular agriculture, the technology to produce animal products such as meat and milk proteins directly from animal and microbial cells.

Biotechnologist Pascale Daran-Lapujade and her group at Delft University of Technology managed to build human muscle genes in the DNA of baker’s yeast. This is the first time researchers have successfully placed such a vital human feature into a yeast cell.

Showering, cleaning, flushing toilets, and industrial production are all processes that use a great deal of water. But what happens to the waste in the water, to everything that is flushed away and disappears into the sewer system together with the water?

One of the big societal challenges today, is that the chemical industry still consumes a considerable amount of energy and resources. “This is a global issue for most, if not all, chemicals that factories produce nowadays”, says researcher Frank Hollmann. He has received a 2.5 M€ ERC Advanced Grant from the European Union to help tackle this problem over the next five years, by engineering enzymes as a catalyst for chemical reactions.

The National Growth Fund of the Dutch government grants conditional funding of 60 million euros to the Cellular Agriculture consortium, whose goal is to produce and promote protein-rich food from cultivated cells. The TU Delft is one of the founders of the consortium, with Marcel Ottens as initiator of the line of research. The TU Delft, together with the companies PlanetBio, DSM, Meatable, CE Delft and others, forms a hub in Delft for this new field of work.

The development of new technologies for biological wastewater treatment is turning our view of sludge upside down. Microbiologist Mark van Loosdrecht receives the 2022 Novozymes Prize for his pioneering work in copying and reusing nature’s mechanisms in wastewater treatment and resource recovery. Van Loosdrecht: “Treating wastewater will become good business in the future.”