The second meeting of the SafeCREW project, funded by the European Union within the Horizon Europe program, has just taken place at Politecnico di Milano. With the support of the research group of Prof. Francesco Trovò of the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, the project aims to support the novel EU Drinking Water Directive by generating advanced knowledge and developing tools and guidelines for disinfected and non-disinfected drinking water supply systems.
Provision of safe drinking water in sufficient quantity is essential for human health and concerns 4 out of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals as defined by United Nations. Both surface water and groundwater are essential resources for drinking water supply throughout the European Union. While water quantity, threatened by increasingly frequent periods of drought, receives much attention, the threats of climate change impacts on water quality for drinking water supply, on the treatment processes necessary for its purification and on the maintenance of drinking water quality along the distribution network are currently inadequately considered.
Despite the long-term experience with the reliable operation of drinking water supply systems, the climate change impacts on water quality require to face a number of new challenges: the (future) need for disinfection, the microbial stability in the distribution network, and the formation of disinfection by-products, with potential adverse effects on human health.
Utilities need to address these challenges, minimizing the risks for final consumers. Currently, drinking water supply systems are very diversified by source of supply, purification processes, characteristics of the distribution networks, so that they must address different concerns to supply drinking water safe for human health. SafeCREW faces these critical issues, focusing on disinfection, its consequences, and the minimization of disinfectant dosages and disinfection by-products formation, and moreover it addresses the potential need for disinfection in currently non-disinfected drinking water supply systems.
Four case studies in three European countries were chosen as representative (Hamburg, Berlin, Milano, Tarragona) to develop novel technological and modelling tools for drinking water treatment and distribution management, with a multidisciplinary approach, which allows to act on the entire drinking water supply system, from the supply source, via purification treatments, up to the final distribution.
More in detail, chemical and microbiological water quality characterization methods will be improved, novel data sets on the occurrence and concentration of so far unknown disinfection by-products will be created, evaluation protocols for materials in contact with water will be identified, innovative and sustainable treatment solutions will be developed to actively respond to the identified threats, the management of distribution networks will be optimized, which can no longer be seen only as passive infrastructures for water distribution, and finally risk assessment procedures will be defined that integrate the effects of mixtures of chemical and microbiological contaminants.