For five years this company, along with Spain’s University of Santiago de Compostela, have been researching how to optimize the energy consumption of water treatment.

The scientific poster presented by FCC Aqualia was chosen as the best from among a field of 56 that were entered at the international conference Activated Sludge – 100 Years and Counting!

The world’s top experts in water treatment were among the 200 researchers who attended this event, representing 35 countries from around the globe. The conference was organized by the International Water Association (IWA) and held in Essen, Germany, in order to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the initial presentation of research on activated sludge, a process that has since been adopted around the world.

The cutting edge wastewater treatment technology from FCC Aqualia is called ELAN® (Autotrophic Elimination of Nitrogen, in English) and it offers significant advances in energy sustainability. The company has been working on this line of research for over five years together with the Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, which also contributed to the poster for the conference. Having now successfully completed several pilot projects with varying capacity levels, the company is currently building Spain’s first full-scale treatment facility of this kind.

FCC Aqualia serves more than 1,100 municipalities and operates over 200 drinking water treatment facilities as well as over 300 wastewater treatment plants in 18 countries (Spain, Italy, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Poland, Rumania, Montenegro, Bosnia, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Algeria, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, China, Uruguay and Tunisia).