Last week, part of the REWAISE team visited Copenhagen to participate in the IWA World Water Congress, dedicated to water for smart and liveable cities.
In order to actively participate in the congress, the team organised two events presenting the progress made in our living labs: a workshop on Water Oriented Living Labs (WOLLs) led by WE&B and a tour to the Swedish living lab led by VAS YD.
The Worksop was held on 14 September under the title “Water Orientated Living Labs (WOLLs) as a mean to engage stakeholders in the development and demonstration of water technologies”.
With an audience of around 40 people, the workshop started with interventions from Water Europe on WOLLs Atlas, Scottish Water Horizons on Water Test Network, WE&B on REWAISE project and Sweden Water Research on Living Lab in the Oresund region. The aim of the workshop was to reflect on how Water Oriented Living Labs can accelerate the systematic application of innovation in water management.
After the interventions, the audience was divided into 4 working groups moderated by the previous speakers to discuss three questions:
- How to organize and develop long-term sustainable WOLLs.
- How to secure and maintain the involvement of citizens and SMEs in the WOLLs
- Methodologies/Tools to remove barriers and speed up adoption of new practices
Together, these conclusions were reached:
- It is difficult to find a common methodology and general recommendations for Living Labs, they are usually based on their own context.
- The very process of constituting Living Labs in a systematic way helps to solve basic problems such as synchronising agendas of different stakeholders or finding common motivations among the stakeholders involved.
- For now, the main debate focuses on the long-term sustainability of these Living Labs, and the financial plans to maintain them, and it seems essential that local authorities are involved in this process.
The roundtable outcomes are now being collected and will be included in the LIVING LAB METHODOLOGY AND ONLINE HANDBOOK.
REWAISE also had the opportunity to be present at the Swedish Pavilion and the Technical Tour to Sweden that the Swedish team and Sweden Water Research organised on Friday 16th, to visit our Skaane Living Lab. The visit was attended by more than 60 participants from 25 different countries who were able to see the REWAISE facilities in the cities of Malmö and Lund where the project works with stormwater and wastewater in new and innovative ways.
In the city of Malmö they were visiting the newly built wooden parking building where stormwater is collected for watering the green walls of the climate-natural building and the Brunnshög parkareain the city of Lund which is planned with sustainability and climate adaptation in focus and where REWAISE is testing membrane techniques to purify stormwater for new uses.
The last stop of the Technical Tour was to the city of Helsingborg where the participants got to visit Recolab. Recolab is the largest source-separated sanitation plant in the world using circular treatment to efficiently recycle greywater, blackwater and food waste. It was also awarded Waste Water Project of the year at the Global Water Awards 2022.
