The project aims to contribute to the global paradigm shift towards digital transformation of the water and sanitation industries
Tomorrow Water has launched the second phase of its Tomorrow Water Project (TWP), a plan aimed at improving the economics and sustainability of wastewater treatment and other key infrastructure elements around the world. The environmental solutions provider seeks to implement TWP in developing and developed countries alike, reducing the environmental impact and costs associated with wastewater treatment and enabling positive environmental and social change globally.
To foster sustainable waste and sewage practices, Tomorrow Water emphasised that wastewater needs to be converted from a cost stream into a revenue stream. As such, TWP supports this philosophy by recovering resources from wastewater, including water, heat, energy, proteins, and nutrients, making it more “economically feasible” to implement sustainable water and sanitation systems in developing nations.
TWP 2.0 aims to revolutionise the value chain of wastewater treatment operations by implementing technologies and engineered solutions that harness and reuse wasted resources like heat, water, energy, and nutrients for other key infrastructure functions like energy generation and IT capacity. TWP 2.0 will also improve the cost-efficiency of wastewater treatment through water artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. In doing so, the company aims to empower developing nations to deploy sustainable, reliable, and affordable sewage treatment systems.
James Kim, COO of Tomorrow Water, commented: “In addition to innovating the value chain of wastewater operations, in TWP 2.0, we intend to incorporate data centres in TWP facilities. Data centres are sorely needed around the world as data processing requirements expand. The limiting factors for data centres in major cities are physical space, cooling capacity, and energy needs.
“By incorporating a data centre onsite at a TWP facility, IT capacity can be expanded for a region in a sustainable, affordable way because the transfer of biogas energy and cooling water between TWP facilities solve data centres’ traditional hurdles.”
The first phase of the project focused on creating the individual wastewater treatment and resource recovery technologies that can enable wastewater facilities to recycle resources and achieve energy self-sufficiency, setting the groundwork for later stages of TWP. Tomorrow Water developed its Proteus+ technology that converts wastewater solids into an energy production feedstock in a process called carbon diversion. When combined with Mainstream Anammox (AMX), the company’s nitrogen removal technology, Proteus+ is able to treat wastewater in developing countries while using 50% less space and 60-70% less energy and requiring half as much time as conventional aeration-based technologies, Tomorrow Water claimed.
Tomorrow Water also integrated energy production technologies such as thermal hydrolysis and biogas production into the same facility as the wastewater plant, allowing the recycling of otherwise wasted heat, water and electricity.
