In this season’s field trial, green beans irrigated with treated wastewater outyielded those watered with tap water. 🌱
That’s one of the results our colleague Marco Hartl brought to Crete last week.
At the 19th IWA International Conference on Wetland Systems for Water Pollution Control (ICWS2026) in Chania, Marco presented our work from GEORGIA EU Project Pilot 4: reusing reclaimed wastewater for local food production at Cambium, an eco-village and project partner in Fehring, Austria.
What the data show:
→ Water quality: our vertECO® green wall combined with ozonation consistently brings E. coli down to EU Water Reuse Class B, and one of this season’s samples even reached Class A. This confirms our full-year campaign published in Ecological Engineering (Vobruba et al., 2025).
→ Crops: green bean yield was highest with a 50:50 mix of reclaimed and tap water. Irrigation with 100% reclaimed water also clearly beat the tap-water control, most likely thanks to the nutrients it carries. The 50:50 mix seems to strike the best balance, as salinity may slightly hold back full-strength irrigation.
The talk sparked sharp questions and good discussions, from technical details to stakeholder engagement. A big thank you to the whole Pilot 4 team, Cambium and everyone across the GEORGIA project, especially Plestenjak Gregor, who planned out the presentation but couldn’t make it to Crete.
Next stop: Sicily, together, with more yield data and more detailed soil and plant analyses.
#WaterReuse #NatureBasedSolutions #WetlandSystems #GEORGIAproject #HorizonEurope
