Prof. Francesco Trovò of the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering is part of the Politecnico di Milano research team which, together with ten partners from Italy, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, participates in the SafeCREW project, funded by the European Union’s key funding programme for research and innovation Horizon Europe. The “Giulio Natta” Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering are also involved in the project.

SafeCREW will conduct research on the conditions for climate-resilient water supply and develop guidelines for action for water suppliers, policy-makers and regulatory authorities.

Climate change poses major challenges for the drinking water supply in Europe. With rising water temperatures and increasing heavy rainfall events, higher amounts of organic substances and microorganisms will also be present in raw water. Well-established processes that have so far guaranteed high drinking water quality will have to be changed and adapted. In southern Europe, disinfection of drinking water is already necessary today. It is possible that even northern European water suppliers will have to use disinfection in the future. One focus will be the investigation of previously unknown disinfection by-products and the further characterisation of already known ones and their formation. With the results, the participating companies intend to develop commercially available methods of quantifying and reducing these by-products so that negative effects on human health can be prevented.

Other major goals will be the definition of protocols to select proper materials in contact with disinfected water and the development of monitoring and modelling tools, also exploiting machine learning, for real-time optimization of drinking water supply systems management.

The SafeCREW consortium of research institutes, European water suppliers, small and medium companies and the German Environment Agency (UBA) will use three case studies in northern Germany, Italy and Spain to drive the further characterisation of water quality, and develop new water treatment methods and better management of water distribution networks to maintain high drinking water quality in the face of climate change.