SUSTDESALT

Development of an overarching framework to achieve sustainable desalination strategies.

The SUSTDESALT project tackles the environmental and economic issues related to using conventional reverse osmosis (RO) for desalting highly saline streams, recovering raw materials, and obtaining fresh water from non-conventional sources.

For that, the project overcomes different challenges through the following objectives: low energy requirements, high water recoveries, low brine generation, and achieving brine valorisation and material recovery.

SUSTDESALT studies new promising technologies using membrane processes to treat several non-conventional streams, such as industrial saline wastewaters, brackish groundwater, and seawater.

The concept of SUSTDESALT is based on the belief that mining minerals from the seawater is possible while desalinating and relies on three key steps:

• Apply a circular supply model.
• Develop highly efficient separation technologies.
• Integrate these and existing technologies into modular brine mining processes to obtain multiple resources simultaneously.

Eurecat participates in the SUSTDESALT project through its Water, Air and Soil (WAS) Unit, which evaluates alternative desalination technologies for industrial effluents.

SUSTDESALT is coordinated by the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC).