BLOOWATER – “Supporting tools for the integrated management of drinking water reservoirs contaminated by Cyanobacteria and cyanotoxins“

General concept

The main objective of the BLOOWATER project is to produce informational resources for Public water supply systems and Agencies to prepare and respond to the risk of the cyanotoxins in drinking water. Practically the project proposes innovative technological solutions that are aimed to develop a methodological approach based on the integration of monitoring techniques and treatment of water affected by toxic blooms (multiple barrier approach). BLOOWATER will integrate innovative methodologies into a multisensor platform to improve water quality through the development of effective low-cost and functional measures into prompt and opportune intervention procedures for efficient and sustainable management of the water resource. The project intends to develop and implement methods to treat freshwater with more efficient processes (PEUF) and will definine diagnostics protocols through the integration of innovative techniques for water monitoring, aimed at creating forecasting models and systems of surveillance and early warning of toxic blooms. These will allow immediate actions such as opportune potabilization treatment. The development of specific algorithms will allow advanced processing of the different spectral and toxicity data to produce predictive and early warning models of toxic blooms useful for stakeholders and in particular for treatment plant operations.

The role of UNIVPM in BLOOWATER

UNIVPM is responsible for determining the treatment efficiencies and the main operative parameters of innovative PEUF configurations for cyanobacteria and cyanotoxin removal initially at laboratory scale. Processes design, development and field validation of the promising water treatment technologies will be further performed at pilot scale. The process validation will be carried out in demonstrative scale (TRL 5-7). The pilot system will be installed in the demo site of Lake Castreccioni (Marche, Italy) and will treat 0.2-0.5 m3/d of surface water. The long-term PEUF operation will be performed at different specific fluxes also to evaluate the cyanobacteria reduction in demonstrative scale. The cyanobacteria removals, the main macropollutants characteristics and the final water quality will be analysed to be compared with the drinking water standards. Finally, a decision support system (DSS) will be developed for the authorities of the involved territories with a tool for the strategic planning of the algal bloom management and in the future to remove the main causes.

Expected impacts

The BLOOWATER will contribute to describe suggestions for managing cyanotoxins issues in raw and treated water. Moreover, the project will provide examples of how public and private utilities can manage this risk. The main barrier/obstacles can be attributed to the inadequate regulations at local level and in particular regarding the management of the single water system supply in the Mediterranean region. An improvement in national (and international) coordination and in particular to start a National project on the control of pollution (and risks) caused by cyanotoxins will be achieved