News

Twenty-five years after the birth of the award-winning Nereda® technology in TU Delft's Mark van Loosdrecht's lab, the 100th Nereda® waste treatment plant is now nearing completion. These plants can now be found all over the world, from Brazil to Sweden and from South Africa to the United States.

With pioneering patents, leading start-ups, strong scientific research and the presence of industrial giants like DSM, the Netherlands has everything it needs to lead a revolution in the field of meat substitutes and cultured meat. Unfortunately, the legislation relating to these products is slowing things down and promising start-ups are moving abroad. Is our country at risk of falling behind?

The NWO has awarded over 5.3 million euros to six projects through the Open Technology Programme, including the research of Ludovic Jourdin to make products from CO2 and renewable electricity, based on a versatile acid. Apart from the NWO funding, companies and other organisations involved invest 1.1 million euros into the projects.

PhD candidate Edward van Dijk is defending his thesis on the Nereda® wastewater treatment technology today. He combined his doctoral programme with his work at Royal HaskoningDHV, where he is doing research into water treatment installations that convert wastewater into clean surface water.

Since last week, a large-scale demo installation in Lampedusa is producing drinking water, salts and chemicals from seawater in an environmentally friendly way. Project leader Dimitris Xevgenos: “This is the first time that we’re producing these marketable products at pre-commercial scale in Europe together with the right actors, including the use of waste heat. People can come and actually see it running.” 

The Dutch government has confirmed that it will allocate €60 million to support an ecosystem around cellular agriculture, the technology to produce animal products such as meat and milk proteins directly from animal and microbial cells.

Biotechnologist Pascale Daran-Lapujade and her group at Delft University of Technology managed to build human muscle genes in the DNA of baker’s yeast. This is the first time researchers have successfully placed such a vital human feature into a yeast cell.

Showering, cleaning, flushing toilets, and industrial production are all processes that use a great deal of water. But what happens to the waste in the water, to everything that is flushed away and disappears into the sewer system together with the water?

One of the big societal challenges today, is that the chemical industry still consumes a considerable amount of energy and resources. “This is a global issue for most, if not all, chemicals that factories produce nowadays”, says researcher Frank Hollmann. He has received a 2.5 M€ ERC Advanced Grant from the European Union to help tackle this problem over the next five years, by engineering enzymes as a catalyst for chemical reactions.