ROUTES: innovative solutions for municipal sludge treatment and management

Management of sewage sludge is going to be a big challenge in near future due to rapid urbanization and economic growth, in particular in Europe. The Routes project http://www.eu-routes.org (ref. # 265156) is addressed to discover new routes in wastewater and sludge treatment which allow: (a) to prepare sludge for agricultural utilization by transforming it in a very clean and stabilized product with respect to hygienic aspects and phytotoxicity; (b) to minimize sludge production by new solutions including the use of innovative processes based on metabolic uncoupling or of innovative reactors like microbial fuel cells or sequencing batch biofilter granular reactor; (c) to promote recovery of valuable materials from anaerobic digestion, i.e. biopolymers as polyhydroxyalkanoates and fertilizers; (d) to set up and prove at practical scale a novel technique for sludge disposal (wet oxidation) as sustainable alternative to the nowadays the most used incineration; (e) to minimize energy pumping by adjusting solid concentration, on a practical installation. The general objective of the Routes proposal is therefore to set up a portfolio of different solutions to be applied in different conditions and circumstances, strictly following the waste hierarchy of the EU Directive 08/98 on waste. The above solutions will be studied either in the laboratory or at practical scale, depending on the maturity of the technology, in order to provide the Commission, the technical and scientific community and end-users with applicable solutions and new routes for sludge management.