“Where are the French students? Some of my industry partners wants to meet them.” My colleague Joydeep, professor in nanotech, scanned the big sunny room where students from 35 countries milled around, getting ready for the thematic roundtable sessions. He had come with two of his senior researchers, a student and collaboration partners, to pick the brains of these 58 extremely smart young people. And, of course, to share his own expertise and knowledge, just like other senior KTH staff in key research areas under the large water umbrella.

At the end of the day, knowledge is not worth much unless it is shared. Moreover, knowledge or a bright idea is not enough. You also have to be able to put it into practice. This was the key purpose of our event on August 28 – “Water your idea” – that the WaterCentre@KTH organized in collaboration with SIWI, Stockholm International Water Institute.

“We don’t want to do something small. We want to save the world.” – Kristian Katholm Nielsen, Denmark

Every year, SIWI awards the Stockholm Junior Water Prize to imaginative young minds from all over the world, encouraging their continued interest in water and sustainability issues.  This year we together invited the Prize finalists from 35 countries for an inspirational day aimed at helping them to become water entrepreneurs and make a difference. All these young scientists – between 15 and 20 years old – have already made a great first effort by winning their national contests with exciting water projects, spanning from innovative bio-tech water treatment using goat hair, to recirculating shower systems. This year’s winner, Macinley Butson from Australia developed a new type of sticker to measure UV exposure for the purpose of solar disinfection of water.

“Find your inner curiosity – and stick to it!” – Mattias Wiggberg, KTH, the first SWJP winner 

During their day here at campus, Gustav Notander at KTH Innovation came with a bunch of good advice and communication tools helping them to move on with their ideas. Mattias Wiggberg, researcher at KTH and also the very first SWJP winner offered a fantastic reflection on what winning the Prize back in 1995 meant to his career, and personally. The visitors also learnt about KTH in general from our vice President Stefan Östlund, about our water activities in particular from Kerstin Forsberg, and met with our KTH “ambassadors” to hear what it is like to study here. As Mikael Östling said in his farewell speech; we want them to come back as masters students or to pursue a PhD degree!

“Water is the one thing that connects all of us – we got to do something to solve it.” – Macinley Butson, Australia

Personally, what I will remember from this day was the energy, enthusiasm, and above all the atmosphere of curiosity that sat in that big sunny room on KTH campus, arising like a gas from the meeting of a younger and an older generation of water scientists. I think it really shows in this short video from the session.

That curiosity, I think, is what will save the world.

David Nilsson, Director of WaterCentre@KTH

An average woman in rural India travels 14,000 km every year just to get water. At the same time clever solutions to manage water more sustainably have found their way from India to Gotland, in the face of increased water scarcity in Sweden. These were some of the interesting things discussed at the full-day conference on water scarcity arranged by KTH and IVL yesterday, as a run-up to World Water Day, March 22.

Almost half of the world’s population live in areas under water stress today and it is not expected to diminish in the decades to come. Water scarcity has been a reality in large parts of the world for a long time, but in recent years it has become a real threat also in a place like Sweden. Water is truly a global challenge, but it manifests itself in local settings and typically must be dealt with by local actors.

On the largest island in Sweden, Gotland, the local authorities have issued a total irrigation ban already from 1 april this year – much earlier than any year before. As Patrik Ramberg, the technical director for Gotland region, explains, the island naturally has very low water storage capacity because of its geology. But the massive drainage programmes implemented in the 19th century made things much worse; most of the wetlands are gone and with them, important buffering capacity. Now a project is going on with IVL and KTH to restore storage capacity and also to promote re-use of wastewater.

Re-use of wastewater came up in several of the examples and presentation. As Christian Baresel from IVL put it; why not just clean the water once, and then keep on using it within the same loop? Alexandra Lazic from Xylem showed that many different solutions for wastewater re-use already have been implemented throughout the world, not least in the USA. Technologies like ozonation, membranes, UV, advanced oxidation, bio-filters etc can be combined in an endless way to match the conditions and needs in different places.

Some large industries have already understood this and are trying ways of re-using not just the water, but also recoving some of the products in the wastewater, like phosphorous. Andreas Rosberg from the metallurgy and tools company Sandvik, pointed out that they think a more circular production would in the end also be good business.

Sweden’s scarcity problem of course pales in comparison with the Indian case presented by Rupali Deshmuk, IVL. ”We don’t even really have water scarcity in Sweden!” proclaimed Bosse Olofsson, geo-hydrology guru and KTH professor. The annual run-off  by far exceeds the withdrawals in our country and the amount of freshwater available per capita is still very high. The problem is that the water is not available where it is needed and when it is needed – such as during the growth season – and therefore water scarcity is a temporal and local phenomenon.

The largest consumer of water is by far agriculture, accounting for around 70% of the water withdrawals globally. And with rising demand from energy production, industry and food production there are bound to be conflicts. The Director General of Swedish Agency for marine and water management, Dr. Jakob Granit, cautioned that we are ill prepared for handling these kinds of conflicts. Responsibility for the many aspects of water management have been portioned out to a plethora of institutions at central, regional and local levels, and the overall picture is one of serious fragmentation.

Fredrik Gröndahl from KTH pointed to the oceans as a solution. Much more of the primary production of food, energy and raw materials could be done through sustainably farming the seas, thus relieving the terrestrial eco-systems and the limited fresh water on land. A good thing about farming the seas is that they don’t need irrigation. Fredrik, calling himself a ”sea farmer”, argued that we can live well off our polluted seas; we don’t need to add nutrients either!

Despite the ominous conference title ”Vattenbristen” (Water Scarcity) the speakers were optimistic about our ability to face up to the challenge. It is obvious that a range of solutions already exist, and that they include technical, organisational and behavioural changes that are within reach. What is needed is closer collaboration between a multitude of actors; politics, finance, academia, industry and citizens. ”Collaboration”, said Jakob Granit, ”cannot just be a word, it must also happen.” In the concluding discussion, Katarina Luhr, Stockholm City councillor invited more collaboration around water, with the view to using the city as a testbed.

If we can get the collaboration right and show a viable business model around sustainable water use, we might be able to not just avoid future problems in Sweden, but also contribute to more just and sustainable water practices globally. Not a bad message for World Water Day!

Video from the conference here

A packed room with 500 people cheering and clapping hands in front of the stage. Walls covered with photos of rock icons like Bowie, Rolling Stones and Joni Mitchell. Am I really at a conference on small scale water and sanitation?

Yes – the conference organisers had the good taste of staging the VAK2019 conference on circular water and sanitation solutions in the Tylösand hotel whose proprietor Per Gessle (Roxette) has turned the establishment into a permanent rock and pop art collection. For two days, these rock and pop culture giants look down at us from their passe-partouts, peeking out from behind the sales materials and pop-up stores of mini-sewage treatment plants, filters, tanks and toilet seats. And it feels… just right.

Come on. Why should there the be even the faintest connection between rock ’n roll and something as unsexy as water and sanitation, you ask?

Because there’s a revolution coming in water and sanitation. The emerging shift to a circular water economy is an outright revolt against age-old principles and norms. A new generation of professionals and consumers are taking up a fight against the burden of history, breaking out of traditions, and charting a new and independent path. If that isn’t Rock ’n Roll, then nothing is.

Maybe I’m getting carried away by the atmosphere in the company of like-minded. So let’s do a recap.

Essentially, most of our so called ”modern” water systems are based on principles of linear transport, which hail from the Middle East and Meditteranean great cultures. The flush toilet is more than 3000 years old. Although the Roman Empire went down their technology, organization and water legislation lived on and was picked up as an ideal in Europe’s 19th century modernisation processes. ”I will turn Paris into a Rome of today” said Baron von Haussmann, as he led the cleaning up of the city and built an extensive sewer network (Reid 1991). The ”Modern Infrastructure Ideal” of networked water and sewerage systems that still dominate the cities of the world are not modern. Essentially, they are antique.

But the global water regime is now under pressure of a magnitude it has not seen since the collapse of the Roman Empire. Why? Due to its inherent logic requiring unrestrained and stable supply of raw water. But worldwide, water scarcity and climate change are now very real.

This transformative pressure has already led to change. Waste water is reused in Spain, Portugal, Israel, Greece, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, the United States and China. Especially for irrigation purposes in agriculture. At 60% of all irrigated agricultural land in Israel, recycled wastewater is used. Also so-called “urban re-use” is on the rise, e.g. flushing, cleaning, golf courses etc. And it is economically beneficial. A study in Hong Kong showed that investment in treatment and reuse of gray water for toilet flushing at property level is profitable already after five years of operation.

But Australia and Hong Kong is very far away. Is re-use of wastewater realistic in Sweden? Two things are clearly pushing us in this direction: the hunt for water and the hunt for energy.

Water is already in short supply in parts of Sweden. We are repeatedly affected by drought, especially during the summer months. More than half of Sweden’s municipalities reported water shortages 2018 and 85 of them issued irrigation bans or other restrictions. Last year Värmdö municipality terminated the service agreement with one of the golf clubs in the municipality. No more tap water for the fairways and greens.

So why not look for opportunities to use the freshwater once more? A number of researchers and students from KTH now investigate precisely this on seven islands in the Swedish, Finnish and Åland archipelago. Within the Circular Water Challenge, as the project is called, we work with the local people, the business community, the municipalities and county councils, and with other experts. Lessons learned on these micro-systems will benefit many others. Together with IVL, KTH also runs Hammarby Sjöstadsverk where we investigate how we can improve costs and performance of circular technology.

Secondly, new requirements for energy efficiency in buildings drive property owners to recover the heat in the wastewater. Some property owners are now thinking about the next step. They investigate the possibilities of reusing the actual hot water. Why not spin around the hot water for showers and basins? This is already happening and in a FORMAS-funded project we investigate what this can mean in the long run.

Yes, but this is only marginal, you might say, what would a few islands or isolated properties matter? The thing is that this is always how technology shifts begin. They start in the margin, in so-called “niches”. We already see municipalities that are planning for entire districts based on a circular principle, such as in Helsingborg. And then things start to happen with the large systems.

So when is the revolution coming? It might come sooner than we think. As I wrote in a blog over a year ago we could face a future where network consumers use both less water and energy. And this may trigger a spiral that make the systems change unexpectedly fast. Surely, we are just in the beginning of the revolution and much work remains.

But I say like Bob Dylan: ”I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it will.”

PS – don’t miss our conference 21st of March on the same topic: ”Vattenbristen”.

Every year around this time we do the accounts. What have we done in the past year? We look back to discern things that happened which distinguishes  this year from other years. We search for things that stand out as a deviation from routine. Maybe it has to do with modern Western view on life as a linear journey with a distinct beginning and a definitive end. Maybe in other cultures, where life and death are just stages in the perpetual cycle of generations, this obsession of progress is less marked.  In fact, most of our lives is about repetition anyway. But an end-of-year blog summing up things that have remained exactly the same will not be very interesting reading. So let me first give you the accounts. Then I’ll return to why life in the future might be more circular.

To communicate some of the cool KTH water research, we produced the exhibition ”Get Wet” for the KTH library which has thousands of visitors every day! Another new feature was the Water Expert Portal aimed at making it easier to find relevant water experts at KTH.

Speaking of experts. The visit of this year’s Stockholm Water Prize Laureates; Mark van Loosdrecht and Bruce Rittmann, was another highlight.  These superstar experts spent a whole morning at KTH talking with students and staff about their water research.

In May, KTH signed a new partnership agreement with Värmdö Municipality. This partnership is already a very lively one, with project courses by master students, field trials of more sustainable desalination technology, and preparation of a new testbed for small-scale water supply.

Our collaboration with IVL, SEI and City of Stockholm has also deepened in the course of the year. Through our collaboration initiatives, we have been able to catalyse several new research projects.

In the MISTRA InfraMaint programme, old networks for piped water and transport meets the digital age. How can sensors and artificial intelligence change the way we manage infrastructure? KTH contributes knowledge from structural engineering, environmental economics and industrial management, in close collaboration with the city of Stockholm. The programme runs for 4 + 4 years and comprises a broad range of actors, coordinated by RISE.

In a new Formas-funded project, a KTH team with competence in energy, water and innovation studies collaborate with ten private and public organisations to understand the system effects of on-property technology for water and heat recovery. A year ago I wrote a blog post about this phenomenon, and its fantastic that we now can learn more about it together with other actors.

We also congratulate our new colleague Dr Timos Karpouzoglou for managing to secure a grant from Formas to compare informal water provision systems in low-income areas of the metro regions of Nairobi and Delhi. These new projects, including a generous contribution from the city of Stockholm, means 25 fresh millions (kronor) to KTH. Not bad.

Finally. The year which passed showed us all with uncomfortable clarity that water is a finite resource. As I pondered in an earlier blog, maybe the summer of 2018 was, with extreme heat, fires, and water scarcity, a glimpse of our future.

In this not so distant future we will need new ways of managing water. The key will be to go from linear flows to circular. Every kid in elementary school knows the hydrological cycle. Yet, all our technical systems for water in human settlements have adopted a linear approach. In the linear approach, water is just a transport medium for carrying human waste. Cheap and easy. But it depends on nature’s moderation of the hydrological cycle, and a cycle turn-around fast enough for our ever-growing demand.

During 2018 we launched the ”Circular Water Challenge”. In the coming year, we will work with communities and students on eight islands in the Baltic Sea to look for solutions for water scarcity, where re-use of water will be at the centre stage. If you are interested in this project please contact Christian Pleijel at KTH Executive School.

Moreover, we have begun building a wide coalition for circular water solutions. What started as an attempt to write a Vinnova application will hopefully grow into a national knowledge network for circular water technologies, including actors from municipalities and public agencies, private sector and academia. Curious? Drop us a line!

Changing from the linear to the circular will require not just a shift of knowledge and practices. It also requires a shift of attitude. We need to challenge our own ideas about what wastewater is and can be used for. Take the example of Pu:Rest, a beer produced in 2018 by our partner IVL and the Carnegie Breweries. A crisp nice lager made out of wastewater from the Hammarby Sjöstadsverk, the experimental treatment plant co-owned by KTH and IVL. Kudos to IVL and Carnegie for that!

In the future perhaps ”recycled” beer will be the standard drink at our monthly WaterPubs. Quite naturally, circular water approaches will become more common as water becomes more scarce. Since water is life, maybe our lives will also be more circular.

Happy New Year!

David Nilsson

Director of the WaterCentre@KTH

Associate Professor in History of Science, Technology and Environment

KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Email: watercentre@kth.se

This was a summer to remember! Swedes are normally not spoilt with sunshine and we know how to complain about too much rain and too many mosquitoes. But this year most of us got more than we bargained for. July was extraordinarily hot and dry, it shows on satellite images. Major Tom agrees from his spaceship; Sweden has turned dry and brown.

The weather is always unpredictable, some may say, and next year we could find ourselves back in umbrella and long-john mode. This may be true in the short run. But this summer has shown us a glimpse, and a very hands-on experience, of the future. Climatologists, scientists and well-known weathermen like Pär Holmgren left no trace of a doubt: the stable ‘heat dome’ over Sweden (värmekupol) was linked to the ongoing process of global warming.

Very recently, researchers linked to the Stockholm Resilience Centre warned about the jittery behaviour of our climate. Some rather complex interactions between the atmosphere, the land masses and our oceans may create “tipping elements” in the planet’s temperature. We may therefore – the researchers suggest – be heading for a faster warming than earlier predicted; towards a permanent ”hot house” of 4-5 degrees above the pre-industrial mean temperature. As a matter of coincidence, this was exactly the temperature rise recorded in Sweden during the month of July, compared to the long-term average.

What we have seen this summer is most likely a first serving of what is to come. Thanks to this extreme summer, we can also start to grasp the consequences of a warmer world also in Sweden. And I’m not thinking about how to chill our bag-in-box-rosé on the beach.

Wild fires have spread across Sweden, at a scale never witnessed before. Tens of thousands of hectares of forest land have gone up in smoke, with inhabitants of entire villages having to flee. Our “arctic wildfires” made headlines all over the world. This said, ours were nothing compared to the massive wildfires still raging in California or the fires in Greece that left almost a hundred people dead.

The Swedish agriculture has taken a huge blow; with crops devastated in large parts of the country and livestock being sent to slaughter as the feed supply dries up. Swedish agriculture is largely rain fed with rather small acreage under irrigation. So when there is no rain, there is no crop. Farmers with irrigation installations have in some places been barred from using them due to water scarcity.

The groundwater levels in small reservoirs have been low or very low throughout Sweden which has not only created problems for the agriculture, but also for municipal drinking water supply. This year, over 100 municipalities introduced irrigation bans or other measures to save on the drinking water supplies. Even Stockholm, drawing water from the huge basin of Lake Mälaren, noted capacity problems as people were filling up their swimming pools and watering lawns in the early summer months.  On the national level, the agency Livsmedelsverket has issued recommendations for water saving, and the drought has been a real test for national crisis coordination. As if this was not enough, the national food agency warned that the warm weather can increase the risk for cyanobacteria, adding water quality risks to the shortage of supply.

All these “new “ water-related problems of 2018 almost made me forget the “old” climate challenges. We still have to deal with increased flood events due to heavy rainstorms, and with the sea level rise.

All doom and gloom? At least we can give the Swedish Environmental Protection agency right. In a 2016 report, the agency predicted that climate change will pose serious challenges to our current conventional water infrastructure.

In some ways, we should be thankful for this summer. It was a wormhole in the time warp; an exclusive pre-screening of a not very distant future. It is also a necessary wake-up call. We need to get serious about reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. For water management, the summer of ’18 tells us that “business as usual” will not be an option. On the whole, water will become more rare, unpredictable and expensive, and our infrastructure will have to follow new design principles. Designs that are more resilient and less wasteful. Designs that promote the principles of reduce and re-use; designs that don’t presuppose that we mix our precious water with human faeces. Designs for a warm, but also sustainable, future society.

Fold up your sleeves. Welcome back to work!

David Nilsson

Director, WaterCentre@KTH