GOALS

Agriculture and food sector, while contributing to human health and prosperity, are on the other side main contributors to environmental impacts, like global warming, eutrophication, acidification, land degradation, and especially water depletion. Due to human population growth in number and wealth, an increasing demand for food is expected in the next decades, putting more pressures on land and requiring other inputs for food production, whilst climate change will pose challenges to agricultural production. Agriculture covers about 40% of the global land area; is the most significant water user in the EU, consuming up to 80% of the total water in some parts of the Mediterranean region and one of the most significant causes of water pollution and salinization.
The overall objective of SWRIPS project is to increase the efficiency, sustainability and competitiveness of the water usage in the agri-food supply chain (SC) in the EU-Med area under a circular economy approach aimed to saving water and minimize the external use of resources, avoiding further contamination of land and water. SWRIPS addresses the thematic “Water Management - Prevent and reduce land and water salinization and pollution due to agri-food activities”. It aims to recover the wastewater produced in the agri-food processing and to reuse the purified water for fertigation purpose while at the same time recovering the substances produced in the process as a matrix for fertilizer, thus putting in place a virtuous cycle that reduces the overall consumption of freshwater, guarantees water availability to farmers, reduce soil drying out and the overall amount of additional fertilizers, is cost effective both for agri-food industries and farmers and, finally, is environmental and human-health friendly.
SWRIPS aims to demonstrate the possibility to

• reduce the problem of scarcity of freshwater and of excessive salinization of the soil and contamination of aquifers, particularly critical in the Mediterranean areas, through the recovery of agri-food industry wastewater for fertigation;
• reduce the need of external fertilizers and therefore the presence of nitrates, phosphates, sulphates etc. through the re-use of water and excess sludge produced in the purification process;
• provide, thanks to an innovative integrated monitoring system, a continuous control of the quality of purified water, also guaranteeing the possibility of early warning in case of excessive pollutant levels (organic components, pesticides, metals) in any of the purification phases;
• control, through microbiology and chemical-physical analyses, all the relevant water, soil and crop parameters involved in the process to define fertiliser application better tailored to crop needs, soil conditions, and the agroecosystem's nitrogen cycle;
• develop a flexible and cost-effective system that allows an optimized use based on crop seasonality and characteristics of the water to be treated, typical of the agri-food industry understudy.