URBANOME
12/09/2024
Urban Observatory for Multi-participatory Enhancement of Health and Wellbeing
WATER-MINING is a four-year project, started on September 1st, 2020, that focuses on the development, exhibition, and validation of energy-efficient technologies and solutions for treating wastewater, in accordance with relevant legislation (e.g., the Water Framework Directive, Circular Economy, and EU Green Deal packages). The project will close on August 31st, 2024.
Under the co-ordination of the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), Netherlands, the project brings together 38 public and private partners, as well as four linked third parties from 12 countries across Europe.
WATER-MINING combines water management services with the improvement of renewable resources, focusing on the wastewater coming from challenging areas, such as urban and industrial ones and from desalination, with the goal to promote the sustainable extraction (through recovering or mining) of new products from the residues generated during the process, and to implement them as new alternative sources of usable water.
More specifically, the project’s ambition is to increase access to clean water and sanitation benefitting all citizens. It also aims to positively impact, through its outcomes, administrative bodies, SMEs, and other companies interested in improving their water management and in joining the market generated by the new sources of bio-based valuable products.
The main role of the ENoLL in WATER-MINING is to provide its expertise in Living Labs methods and practices. In this light, ENoLL guides the set-up and harmonization of two Living Labs interested in undergoing the ENoLL labelling process by performing an official evaluation – a structural and methodological quality assessment on their maturity as innovation ecosystems – to let them become ENoLL official members. The aim is to provide detailed feedback to these two Living Labs to speed up their maturity curve and help them become role models. As part of the evaluation exercise with the collaborating partners, a new thematic domain specific evaluation criterion will be experimented and developed for water-oriented Living Labs.
In addition to this, ENoLL’s role is also to conduct a replicability study in collaboration with two of its members working on water-oriented projects and activities, Coventry and GAIA Living Labs, to find ways to multiply the best practice projects running in the Netherlands and Spain and to identify the boundaries of the multiplication, if any.
Finally, during the project lifespan, ENoLL also contributes to the dissemination and communication activities of the project at international level, by promoting the project’s achievements, events, and updates, as well as by designing and implementing co-creation sessions and workshops to be hold in roll-out events focused on water-related topics and discussions (e.g., in online and in person conferences).
The European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) is the international, non-profit, independent association of benchmarked Living Labs.
