PROMISCES will identify how industrial pollution prevents the deployment of the circular economy (CE) in the EU and which strategies help overcome key bottlenecks to deliver the ambitions of the European Green Deal and Circular Economy Action Plan. PROMISCES considers specific CE routes including (i) semi-closed water cycles for drinking water supply at urban and catchment scale; (ii) wastewater reuse for irrigation in agriculture; (iii) nutrient recovery from sewage sludge; (iv) material recovery from dredged sediment and (v) land remediation for safe reuse in urban areas. To reach its goals, PROMISCES will: - Develop new analytical methods and toxicological tools to provide data on persistent, mobile (PM) substances (i.e. PFAS and other industrial chemicals) in complex environmental matrices. - Explore sources and environmental pathways of PM substances released from (i) soil; (ii) sediment; (iii) landfills; (iv) wastewater treatment plants and via (v) urban runoff into relevant environmental compartments (soil, sediment, surface water, groundwater). - Assess fate and transport pathways within the different CE routes and evaluate the impacts of corrective measures. - Improve the assessment and management of human health risks from drinking water and agricultural products. - Develop and demonstrate cost-efficient and sustainable technologies for the removal of PM substances from different media. - Translate PROMISCES results into guidance for efficient and feasible management of PM substances and recommendations for the implementation of relevant EU policy strategies and directives. - Integrate the results into a decision support framework which considers resource recovery and water reuse and supports chemical management decisions with regards to i) stakeholders and societal demands; ii) PM chemical properties iii) technical solutions to prevent, mitigate and remediate industrial pollution and iv) the whole life cycle of current and future chemicals.

The AquaNES project will catalyse innovations in water and wastewater treatment processes and management through improved combinations of natural and engineered components. Among the demonstrated solutions are natural treatment processes such as bank filtration (BF), managed aquifer recharge (MAR) and constructed wetlands (CW) plus engineered pre- and post-treatment options. The project focuses on 13 demonstration sites in Europe, India and Israel covering a repre-sentative range of regional, climatic, and hydrogeological conditions in which different combined natural-engineered treatment systems (cNES) will be demonstrated through active collaboration of knowledge and technology providers, water utilities and end-users. Our specific objectives are • to demonstrate the benefits of post-treatment options such as membranes, activated carbon and ozonation after bank filtration for the production of safe drinking water • to validate the treatment and storage capacity of soil-aquifer systems in combination with oxidative pre-treatments • to demonstrate the combination of constructed wetlands with different technical post- or pre-treatment options (ozone or bioreactor systems) as a wastewater treatment option • to evidence reductions in operating costs and energy consumption • to test a robust risk assessment framework for cNES • to deliver design guidance for cNES informed by industrial or near-industrial scale expe-riences • to identify and profile new market opportunities in Europe and overseas for cNES The AquaNES project will demonstrate combined natural-engineered treatment systems as sus-tainable adaptations to issues such as water scarcity, excess water in cities and micro-pollutants in the water cycle. It will thus have impact across the EIP Water’s thematic priorities and cross-cutting issues, particularly on ‘Water reuse & recycling’, ‘Water and wastewater treatment’, ‘Water-energy nexus’, ‘Ecosystem services’, ‘Water governance’, and ‘DSS & monitoring’.

European Water utilities environment is embedded in a context dealing with global issues such as water scarcity and technical-economic issues such as infrastructure aging. Management of drinking water supply is facing key challenges partly related to traditional water meter, such as managing capital and operational costs; water loss (also known as non-revenue water) due to leaks and other system failures; and water scarcity/conservation. The core of the solution lies in the renewed access and use of accurate data that Smart Water Metering can provide to decrease operating costs, identify performance issues, improve customer service and better prioritize infrastructure investments. SMART.MET strongly paves the way to a more efficient management providing for example automatic reading of the household meters and billing, real time assessment of water balance for leak detection, identification of abnormal behaviors and awareness-raising, ability to identify user-meters defaults. However, the lack of common European standards and lack of “open technological platforms” combined to the high transaction cost on the demand side create a lock-in situation in the market and determine a situation of long-term dependency of water operators on technology providers. This determines high average operating costs for water operators and users, as well as collective inefficiency related to the multiplication of different proprietary solutions on the offer side. The objective of the proposal is thus to drive the development of new technologies to manage smart metering data collection and management, driven by a group of 7 water utilities through a joint Pre Commercial Procurement (PCP). They are supported by 6 expert organizations for assessing the technologies, implement the new procurement procedures and disseminate the outcomes of the project to other utilities and solutions suppliers. The duration of the project is 48 months.