The initiative’s first report published

During late autumn 2024 and spring 2025, the first project of this initiative was carried out with co-funding from the Impact Innovation program Water Wise Societies.

Within the project, we defined a desired future for the year 2050:

  • The EU has imposed clear and reasonable requirements for measurement at wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) larger than 2,000 population equivalents, as well as for reporting emissions. If the EU has not set strict emission limits, Swedish legislation has imposed tougher requirements, mandating that direct nitrous oxide emissions from Sweden be minimised.
  • We know the scale of nitrous oxide emissions because we continuously measure them, and we keep emissions at very low levels.
  • Renovation, expansion, and new construction projects of WWTPs take low nitrous oxide emissions into account during the design phase.
  • Multiple suppliers capable of delivering complete measurement equipment are available on the market.
  • User-friendly AI-based data analysis tools are available.
  • The Swedish wastewater system has begun a major transformation to collect nitrogen from wastewater and recirculate it directly into Swedish food production. This is done through source-separating wastewater systems, meaning that treatment plants no longer receive all nitrogen from residents, thereby also reducing nitrous oxide emissions.

Examples of follow-up projects we identified during the initiative are listed below:

  • Dissemination of knowledge through the newly launched website.
  • Promoting the installation of measurement equipment at WWTPs.
  • Supporting the development of new measurement technologies.
  • Identification of suitable measurement points.
  • Increasing understanding of the underlying causes of emissions.
  • Studies of microbiology related to full-scale emission measurements.
  • Creating a freely accessible software library containing the functions necessary for analysing nitrous oxide emissions from WWTPs, as well as data-driven models that can predict nitrous oxide emissions and describe how they correlate with other data.

There were discussions about establishing a transition lab through the latest Water Wise Societies call, but we were not ready to allocate the time and funding needed to administrate such a lab at this stage.

We encourage you to read the full report here.

Belongs to project

Reduce the emissions of nitrous oxide from wastewater treatment