The agrifood industries have the challenge of adopting the principles of circular economy in the water management. The aim is to redesign the production processes having in mind to avoid wastewaters and to consider all the liquid currents generated as a source of resources.

The goal is to reach the maximum efficiency in the water use optimising its use and facilitating the resources recycling and water reuse in the plant or the surrounding environment.

A change in the way of thinking with an integral vision and circular use of water together with the incorporation of new treatment technologies will make possible this transformation.

This way, AINIA technological centre has organised the III technical seminar about Circular Economy in Agrifood Industries the past 9th April in Valencia (Spain, https://www.ainia.es/jornada-gestion-agua/). This event was divided into different sessions to address different aspects of this issue. One of these sessions was the research and innovation in this topic where IDENER had the pleasure of presenting the AFTERLIFE project, an H2020 funded project coordinated by María López, team leader and project manager at IDENER in the department of biochemical applications.

The AFTERLIFE project proposes a flexible, cost- and resource-efficient process for recovering and valorizing the relevant fractions from wastewater. It will represent an advance on existing approaches to wastewater treatment, which rely on physic-chemical and biological methods.

The process developed in AFTERLIFE will separate out the different components of value using a series of membrane filtration units that will separate all the solids in the wastewater. These will then treated to obtain high-pure extracts and metabolites or, alternatively, to be converted into value-added biopolymers; polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs). In addition to the value extracted from the solids, the remaining outflow of the water will be ultrapure and ready for re-use. Know more about this project: http://afterlife-project.eu 18-06-22_AFTERLIFE-process_A0