Future Challenges: How we’re innovating for the future

The water industry are facing some big challenges. From the impacts of climate change increasing demand on our networks, to making sure we continually improve the service we provide to customers, we’re innovating to make improvements across all areas of our business.

Our Bluewave innovation team are focussed on thinking ahead, to get an upfront view of these challenges as they develop, finding solutions that will help us adapt to the future. We’re not only looking at how we can help solve the challenges we’ve already identified, but also exploring what the next generation of challenges could be, to try and give us enough time to solve them.

We’re working closely with key partners, including universities, delivery partners and the wider water industry to be prepared for the future. Through research projects, including funding PhDs, as well as the Ofwat Innovation fund and working with our partners at the University of Portsmouth at our on-site research facility in Hampshire, we’re looking at important areas such as process emissions, emerging contaminants and resource recovery.

Process Emissions

The water industry has set an ambitious target of having net zero carbon emissions by 2030, meaning the total amount of carbon we emit needs to be removed elsewhere, equalling zero overall

Emissions from our processes are unavoidable – it's a natural consequence of working with organic material (poo), which breaks down into carbon, methane and nitrous oxide. We’re working on different ways to manage our emissions, starting by understanding exactly where and when we emit them. From there, we can find which options have the biggest impact, starting with improving the efficiency of our operations (reducing the amount of energy we use and therefore our carbon impacts) while exploring how we can increase the use of renewable energy and the amount of energy we generate from gas on site.

Emerging Contaminants

Currently, we treat our wastewater to remove contaminants that have been recognised as damaging to the environment, like phosphorus or chemicals like pesticides. Some of these are called regulated contaminants, because they’re known risks, and we’re regulated by the Environment Agency to remove them. Emerging Contaminants are things that haven’t yet been regulated, so they’re being explored by researchers as possible future risks, both inside and outside the water industry. This can be things like pharmaceuticals and newer pesticides. While water companies aren’t the source of these contaminants, we are a potential route into the environment. So, we’re conducting research to learn more about these emerging contaminants, so we can be ahead of the curve to explore how we can remove them. Our work in this area needs to be very forward-looking, even just to understand what sorts of approaches we should be looking at in the future – in some cases the technologies needed don’t even exist yet!

Resource recovery

It's no secret that fertiliser costs have increased over the past few years, and this is expected to continue. However, did you know that it’s possible to recover nutrients - such as phosphorus, nitrogen & ammonia)- from wastewater, for use in agriculture? Currently, the solids from wastewater form a sludge, that can be used by farmers once it’s been treated by us, but we’re now exploring options for how we can extract nutrients more directly, and create high-quality fertilisers that are more efficient for farmers to use.

Bluewave is helping to future-proof Southern Water and protect our future environment by building these learnings and potential solutions into our future innovation strategy. Watch this space for more ways we’re innovating to adapt for the future.

Do you want to hear more? Have a research project you want to work with us on? Email bluewave@southernwater.co.uk.