Aachen Network for Waste Water Reuse
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AIX-Net-WWR, the Aachen Network for Waste Water Reuse, is a network that aims to "give new life to wastewater" not just once but over and over again.
Climate change worldwide, with record heat and drought, is increasingly leading to regional water shortages on the one hand and flooding on the other. With the 2030 Agenda adopted in 2015, the United Nations agreed on 17 "Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)" for a climate-friendly transformation of the global economy. Sustainable water management is one of the basic prerequisites for implementing and achieving the SDGs. Alongside this, the pioneering framework conditions for the AIX-Net-WWR project also arise from the European Green Deal and the increasing importance of Environmental Social Governance (ESG) investment criteria in the financial market.
Today, most cities have centralized water supply and wastewater disposal systems with drawbacks such as decreasing water supplies, loss of recyclables, and increasing water pollution. In the AIX-Net-WWR City of the Future, standardized, semi-decentralized wastewater reuse systems are being developed at the neighborhood level with innovative individual technologies that solve the mentioned problems for industrial and commercial wastewater. The semi-decentralized systems, after all, enable the direct reuse and utilization of the treated water and the energy present in the wastewater directly at the point of wastewater generation. This makes ecological and economic optimization possible.
To achieve the goals of the alliance, 12 companies, one start-up and 5 research institutions from the Aachen region have joined forces within five collaborative projects under the coordination of INTEWA GmbH from Aachen. The network is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as part of the RUBIN program ("Regional Entrepreneurial Alliances for Innovation"). By 2031, it is planned to create approximately 200 additional jobs in the city region, which is currently experiencing structural change as a result of the planned phase-out of coal by 2038.
Thereby, the Chair of Management Accounting is responsible for the business assessment and development of innovative operator models within the joint project "Semi-decentralized wastewater treatment system (Waste Water Reuse (WWR)-System)". The models are developed taking into account the modular structure of WWR systems, the needs of potential operators as well as the legal and regulatory framework of operation.