The H2020 Run4Life project is organising a Stakeholder Engagement Workshop as a side event at the IFAT trade fair in Munich, on May 17th. Everyone with an interest in nutrient recovery is invited to take part in this inspiring event. The programme includes a wide variety of speakers ensuring that it will be a very interesting morning. Please visit http://run4life-project.eu/run4life-ifat to have a look at the programme, and register your attendance. 
Category: English
Implementing Urine Drying technology in Durban, South Africa
Prithvi Simha, Jenna Senecal, and Björn Vinnerås just returned after spending a week in Durban, South Africa. We travelled there to present our novel sanitation technology called alkaline urine dehydration to several potential collaborators, and to see if the technology could fit into the local context. We met with sanitation experts from the Pollution Research Group at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, the eThekwini Municipality, and Envirosan (a toilet manufacturer based in Durban). The trip was extremely fruitful with a positive response from all experts about our technology. We even brought back with us two new urine-diverting toilets to test our system with (thank you Envirosan!). Our next step will be to return to Durban with a pilot-scale urine drying system that the Pollution Research Group will test at their research facility. Following this, drying units will also be tested in people’s homes at the eThekwini municipality. A big thank you to Chris Buckley for co-ordinating the trip & to the NJ Committee on Global Affairs for the financial assistance.
SLU EnviroSan Loot; PC: Chris Buckley
Edible Insects: the Value Chain, symposium at Wageningen
Last month, Giulio Zorzetto from our research group participated in the ‘Edible Insects: the value chain‘ symposium hosted by Wageningen University at Ede, Netherlands. The symposium celebrated 10 years of research related to the utilization of insects as novel food and feed. Giulio contributed to the event by presenting a poster on the cold storage of early instar of the black soldier fly in order to provide a buffer of available larvae to black soldier fly farms. Click here to access the presentation.
PC: Wageningen University, Netherlands
The 2018 Water Prize ceremony in Stockholm
Professor Håkan Jonsson received the 2018 Water Prize from Föreningen Vatten yesterday (14.03.2018) for his work on nutrient recycling. Many congratulations to him from all of us at the kretsloppsteknik research group at SLU!
Marta Ahlquist-Juhlén from Föreningen vatten delivering the Vatten-priset to Professor Håkan Jönsson; PC – Magnus Berglund
Non-grid solutions for the future of urban water management workshop Monte Verita, 14-17 March
Björn Vinnerås participated in this meeting at ETH, Monte Verita venue in Ascona, Southern Switzerland. The venue was quite picturesque, with palm trees in the foreground and snowy mountains in the background.
The view from the workshop venue, Monte Verita. PC: Björn Vinnerås
New study on occurrence and concentrations of PFASs in Uganda
In a very recent study published in Science of the Total Environment, Sahar Dalahmeh, a researcher at the Environmental Engineering Unit and her co-workers investigated concentrations and partitioning of 26 per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) in wastewater, surface water, soil and crop plants (yam, maize and sugarcane) in Nakivubo wetland and Lake Victoria at Kampala, Uganda.
Location of the study area at Kampala, Uganda, and the sampling sites
Water Research School annual meeting in Luleå
This year’s annual meeting of the Water Research School, of which many members of the kretsloppsteknik research group are part of, was hosted by Luleå Tekniska Universitet (LTU) between 7-8 February. Solveig Johannesdottir, Jennifer McConville and Prithvi Simha from our group made it to Luleå for the 2-day event. On the first day, they got to hear about LTU’s current research on urban drainage & stormwater management, VR platforms for visualisation, and the effects of shifting the city centre in Kiruna & Gällivare on urban water and sanitation. Day 2 started with two interesting lectures – the first where Prof. Lennart Elfgren shared his views on ‘how to do a PhD and feel good about it’; the second where Prof. Javier Martin-Torres talked about discovering transcient water on Mars. 
Water Research School group picture at Gråsjälören. PC: Salar H. Afshar
Building blocks of modular BSF treatment are put together in a course
Our one-day-course in modular fly larva treatment is in high demand. After the first course opportunity in December 2017, the course was organized again on 14 March 2018, with eight participants from different Swedish companies and universities.
In the morning Cecilia Lalander and Evgheni Ermolaev gave an in-depth introduction to the concept of a modular system developed at SLU and presented the possibilities on waste management with the black soldier fly larvae. Details on both the fly rearing and waste treatment modules were presented.
Research-Policy Interaction for Sustainable Development
Prithvi Simha, PhD student at the Kretsloppsteknik group attended a course on research-policy interaction at the Gothenburg Centre for Sustainable Development (GMV). The course was given as part of the ‘Water Research School‘ for PhD students in Sweden, of which several candidates from our group are part of. The course involved creating a research-to-policy plan related to Prithvi’s PhD research on urine dehydration, understanding models for stakoholder interaction and learning to effectively communicate with policymakers. Course participants also got to hear from Johan Kuylenstierna, former CEO of Stockholm Environmental Institute, on his personal experiences of science-policy interaction. 
Course participants from the Water Research School; PC – Linda Kanders
Molecular Methods course in Finland
Jenna Senecal attended a course on Molecular Methods for Detection of Food- and Waterborne Pathogens in Helsinki, Finland (04.03.2018-08.03.2018). The course was taught and attended by top researchers from the Nordic countries. She learned about the latest available technologies for DNA extraction and analyses being used for detecting pathogenic strains of viruses, bacteria and parasites.
Group Photo with PCR