Agenda

Anna Delgado, Water Specialist at the World Bank, is the Author of the Water in Circular Economy and Resilience report. Her report aims to promote a common understanding on the definition and applications of circular economy principles and resilience in the urban water sector. Anna Delgado will introduce different challenges and opportunities and will therefore, set the focus of the event.

During this session, we will go into detail on the three different focus areas of this years BLUE PLANET Berlin Water Dialogues. At first, Dr. Anne Kleyböcker from the Centre for Competence on Water Berlin will speak about Water smart industrial symbioses: recovering and reusing resources from industrial wastewater in her presentation on outcomes of the ULTIMATE project.

The title of Christian Kabbe’s presentation will be Nutrient recycling – Quality matters! Volume matters! Reliability matters! – for Circular Economy, where he will focus on nutrient recovery from wastewater. In specific, we will learn how EasyMining Germany, a joint Venture from the Gelsenwasser AG and EasyMining Services Sweden AB, is recovering high quality phosphorus from sewage sludge ash.

In the focus area Water-Energy-Nexus we will have a combined presentation by Timo Paul from Vattenfall and Heinrich Gürtler from the Berliner Wasserbetriebe on the Potential of Wastewater Heat as a Carbon Neutral Source - Benefits of Sector Coupling. Together, they will present a pilot project in which a large scale wastewater heat pump will fuel the Berlin district heating system with carbon neutral thermal energy.

Daniela Bemfica is Director of Strategic Programmes and Engagement at IWA, where she leads the programmes on Water and Sanitation Services and Cities of the Future. The IWA Programmes establish change agendas on key topics for a water-wise world that contribute to sustainable development. In her Keynote, we will learn about the wide range of IWA’s initiatives, events and publications and how they boost Circular Water Economy as a globally active association.

Dr. Christian Remy, Group Leader Energy & Resources, Environmental Engineer at KWB, is focusing his research on the Life Cycle Assessment of wastewater treatment schemes in Projects like Carbon is Money: From Wastewater to Energy (CARISMO) or Creating Synergies Between Municipal Solid Waste and Wastewater Management (REEF 2W). He will be moderator for the panel on Economic Viability & Sustainability in Circular Economy. We will discuss experiences and results of long-term Circular Economy measures in the Water Industry and which adjustments had to be implemented to sustain the economic viability. Speakers In the discussion will be representatives of the industry, utilities and institutes, amongst others Christoph Blöcher, Head of Infrastructure Processes, Materials & Corrosion at Covestro and Olaf van der Kolk, Managing Director at AquaMinerals B.V.

Dr. Ulf Stein, Senior Fellow and Coordinator Water Studies at Ecologic Institute, is responsible for the institute's water research division. His work focuses on the sustainable management of water resources, especially with regard to environmental planning and adaptation to climate change. In presentations by Prof. Matthias Barjenbruch, Chair of Urban Water Management at TU Berlin and Dr. Marcel Schneider, Researcher at Leibniz Institute for Plasma Science and Technology e.V., we will learn more about the future of water reuse in cities and what opportunities plasma technology offers in this field.

Dr. Bettina Rechenberg is head of the Department II “Sustainable Products and Production, Circular Economy” of the Federal Environment Agency (UBA). Besides being a member of the advisory board of the BLUE PLANET Berlin Water Dialogues, she will moderate a break-out session on Water Energy Management - Treatment plants as energy source. Tosca Zech, project manager of the engineering company Dr. Resch + Partner, will speak about the Energy-intelligent wastewater treatment plant Schwarzenbruck and her experiences from the operation of the plant. The project was funded by the Environmental Innovation Program of the German Federal Ministry for the Environment and the UBA.

Prof. Sven-Uwe Geißen holds the Chair of Environmental Process Engineering at the TU Berlin. In this position he was responsible for the coordination of various projects in the field of Circular Water Economy like WavE or HighCon. In this session Prof. Geißen will moderate a discussion around the development of innovative processes for the reuse of industrial wastewater up to the recycling of the concentrates, because the wastewater of one process can be the resource of a completely different one.

Phoebe Koundouri is Professor in Economics and Director of ReSEES Laboratory at the School of Economics of the Athens University of Economics and Business and Director of the Sustainable Development Research Unit at ATHENA Information Technology Research Center. She holds a MPhil and a PhD in Economics from the University of Cambridge and is recognized as a pioneer in innovative, human-centric, interdisciplinary systems for the sustainable interaction between nature, society, and the economy. Based on her work in the project Water-Futures, she will share an outlook on how the water infrastructure in cities of the future will look like. Crisis and increasingly uncertain climate conditions have increased the need for a more holistic and intelligent decision-making in the management of water infrastructures, how can these systems become more socially equitable, economically efficient and environmentally resilient?