This year on March 22 the World Water Day was celebrated focusing on “accelerating change” to solve the water and sanitation crisis. This fits to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6: Clean water and Sanitation. In 2015, when the SDGs were set the vision was that everyone would have safely managed water and sanitation by 2030. Currently, billions of people and countless schools, businesses, healthcare centres, farms and factories seem to not have access to water and sanitation. The UN 2023 Water Conference, 22-24 March, was the place where solving the water and sanitation crisis was discussed. This Conference will launch the Water Action Agenda, which will include commitments from people around the world.
GREENER Project includes SDG 6 along with others (SDG 9, 13,14 and 15) in its priority actions. GREENER is close to its end and has aimed to identify and characterise different mixture of contaminants in surface and ground waters. Several bioremediation technologies for polluted surface and ground water have been developed and validated at lab scale, both individually and integrated in hybrid systems for enhanced treatment. In particular the project has succeeded to achieve i. dyes removal by novel approaches in phycoremediation, ii. optimization of phytoremediation technology for toxic metals and metalloids removal, iii. development of bio-electrochemical systems for TPHs, pesticides, antibiotics and PAHs removal, iv. development of a novel technology for metal removal as nanoparticles from biological systems, and v. development of an integrated system for effective groundwater bioremediation. Followingly, after defining the operation conditions for the scale-up for water remediation technologies pilot scale projects were validated and tested in selected locations of interest. Moreover, reduction of energy demand during bioremediation technologies to the minimum necessary related to processes and transport was achieved followed by bioelectricity generation through microbial fuel cells.