Saving on water in industrial processes can help reduce costs and protect against concerns of water scarcity. Innovation is taking place in the ceramics and chemicals sectors to recycle water and cut resource use.
In June 2025, the European Commission published its water resilience strategy, saying that Europe needs to ensure water security as, by 2030, global water demand will exceed available resources by 40%.
The strategy emphasised the need to innovate on water efficiency. The Commission views this as a business opportunity and an area in which Europe is already leading, holding 40% of patents related to water technology globally.
Improving resource efficiency and supporting the transition toward a circular economy is fundamental to increase competitiveness, says Maria Grazi Asci, an environmental engineer at SIMAM, an Italian environmental services company.
The company is working on two demo sites with the Innovative Water Recovery Solutions project (iWAYS) to improve water efficiency, one in Italy looking at how to do this in the ceramics industry and one in Sweden exploring this in the chemicals sector.
“The two case studies represent how industries can transform waste into resources to be recovered and, with particular reference to the water resources, fits as a contribution to the European water resilience strategy,” Asci explains.
She answers some questions about how these work.
SIMAM is working with iWAYS on several projects to reduce water consumption. Why is this so important for industries?
Water reuse has become essential for all industries, especially for those like the ceramic industry, which have high water consumption at various production stages and large volumes of wastewater that needs treating.
Implementing internal wastewater treatment and reuse allows companies to reduce their freshwater consumption and the need to discharge waste externally, ultimately creating circular systems.
Thanks to the iWAYS system developed in the demonstration projects, it becomes possible to recover water from the condensate produced by heat exchange, known as the heat pipe condenser economiser, from which heat is also recovered.
The Italian demo site uses filtration technologies – an ultrafiltration unit and a nanofiltration unit – to reach the zero-discharge goal. How do these create more efficient water usage?
These membrane processes generate two different types of discharge streams typically handled as waste: the backwash and concentrate. In the case study developed for the ceramic sector, it was evaluated that these streams can also be reused in the production cycle – in particular they are suitable for re-use in the grinding section.
In the case of the Atlas Concorde demosite, it is estimated that over 1,800 litres an hour, or 10,000 tons a year, can be recovered and reused in the production process (the permeate in the glazing section and the concentrate in the grinding section). Testing and data collection are on-going to verify and validate the system.
What are the biggest challenges in the water treatment process and how did you overcome them?
The system defined for Atlas Concorde combines filtration technologies used in other relevant and operational environments, but not yet for treating a stream like this, which has a high value of Chemical Oxygen Demand and traces of oil and hydrocarbons. The experimental phase aims to test and demonstrate the operation and the performance.
SIMAM is also working on improving the efficiency of water use at the Alufluor chemical factory in Sweden. How does this work?
The prototype designed by SIMAM should recover up to around 10,000 litres of water per hour, which has an average temperature of 55°C and is saturated by calcium fluoride. The solution includes a sand filter to completely remove this and a softener to reduce the water’s hardness.
However, this system has not yet been used for this particular wastewater stream. The operating conditions of the entire system are unconventional and very challenging. This includes the high temperature because softening technology usually works at lower than 35°C.
The activities of the iWAYS project, with particular reference to the demonstration phase, could allow the identification of new fields of application for the selected technologies and to extend the limit value for the operational conditions.