This week, Marco Hartl, our Team Lead for Nature-Based Solutions & Water, gave a flash talk at univie:connect – Green Innovations event, with participants from the City of Vienna, Vienna’s green spaces, business, and research.
Drawing on lessons from our patented technologies vertECO® and GRETA™, he showed how microbes (the unseen heroes!) in synergy with roots and plants on walls and façades treat greywater and wastewater where it is produced, for reuse in toilet flushing and irrigation. The green walls also cool their surroundings, support biodiversity, reduce noise and air pollution, and insulate buildings.
Highlights from the talk:
💧 Nature does the heavy lifting, and a compact ozonation unit brings the water to reuse standards.
🏙️ Going vertical brings water treatment into dense urban spaces.
🌱 At the Cambium residential and food producing community, beans irrigated with treated wastewater yielded more than beans irrigated with tap water.
🔹 Within the Horizon Europe ATRIUM Project, GEORGIA EU Project, and VERNE Project, we are further developing and testing GRETA™ and vertECO®.
We thank the European Union, FFG and all our project partners for the research & innovation support which enabled us to develop and prove these technologies, as well as Jacqueline Bitai and the univie:connect team at the University of Vienna, and sponsors aws, the City of Vienna, BMIMI and Climate Lab (home to our office).
The event was also a great opportunity for networking. Marco and his colleague Antonia Zerobin had inspiring conversations with researchers from many disciplines and with actors from the city and the innovation ecosystem, including Stadt Wien, FFG Österreichische Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft mbH, aws, Climate Lab, Wiener Stadtgärten MA 42 and many more. We look forward to following up!
Missed us at the Meet&Match?
We have open research questions from microbiology to economics. Get in touch!
#NatureBasedSolutions #WaterReuse #GreenInnovation #CircularEconomy #HorizonEurope #ClimateAdaptation #Biodiversity #Vienna
