Every day, excess nitrogen from the overuse of fertilisers, industrial wastewater and urban sewage accumulates in water and ends up in our rivers and lakes.
This causes eutrophication, damaging aquatic ecosystems and reducing water quality. In eLitre, we want to develop sustainable technologies to recover this nitrogen from wastewater and use it to create useful, valuable products, such as ammonia and sustainable biopolymers.
The project eLitre was funded under the Water4All partnership with 1.1M€, and will run over the next 3 years. Our multidisciplinary Consortium brings together ICFO, the University of Galway, TUDelft, the Lodz University of Technology and the industrial partner Sorigué.
Our approach is multidisciplinary and combines renewable energy with advanced electrochemical processes. First, we will selectively convert the dissolved nitrates in the water into ammonia through the direct electrolysis of water. Then, we will purify this ammonia so it can be used as a fertilizer or as a valuable chemical feedstock. Part of the recovered ammonia will also be used to optimize nutrient balances in photobioreactors, where microorganisms produce sustainable biopolymers.
Throughout the project, we will also evaluate performance metrics such as the efficiency and scalability of each step, developing models to identify the most promising route towards technological viability. By denitrifying water and recovering valuable resources, our technology will help to reduce pollution while producing useful chemicals, moving us closer to a more circular and resource-efficient economy.