What is your organisation’s role in the NAMOR project?
Imperial College London (Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering) leads the work devoted to Circularity, Sustainability & Safe‑and‑Sustainable‑by‑Design (SSbD) considerations, and co‑develops a Decision Support System (DSS) that interfaces with the project’s digital twin. Concretely, ICL delivers the environmental LCA, techno‑economic assessment (with partners), social LCA, circularity indicators (ISO 59020), and SSbD risk assessment, and feeds these multi‑criteria results into the DSS so operators and policy‑makers can choose configurations that minimise energy and emissions while maximising water/nutrient recovery. ICL also steers policy‑relevant recommendations and exploitation inputs grounded in its prior DSS and circularity work.
What do you expect to be the key benefits that the NAMOR project will deliver?
NAMOR will help Europe manage water more efficiently by bringing treatment closer to where water is used, rather than relying only on large central plants. It will demonstrate flexible local systems in different European climates, making it easier to reuse water safely for everyday needs such as irrigation, public spaces, and emergency uses.
The project aims to make water treatment more sustainable by reducing energy use, cutting emissions, and recovering valuable nutrients and materials. By combining novel treatment processes with smart digital tools, NAMOR will support more reliable operation and better day-to-day decision-making.
At the same time, NAMOR promotes a more circular approach to water management by turning by-products into useful resources and by involving public authorities, businesses, researchers, and communities so the solutions are practical, accepted, and easier to scale across Europe.
How have the first months of the NAMOR project been for ICL so far?
We’re setting the scene, meeting partners, mapping data and getting a deeper understanding of the systems, before we dive into the full assessments.
