6th General Meeting of Water2REturn via GoToMeeting
The 6th General Meeting of Water2REturn project was organised online via GoToMeeting on April 1st – 2nd, 2020. It was going to take place in Seville, Spain but, due to the COVI-19 crisis and the impossibility of travelling, it was finally held virtually, what made possible the attendance of all partners.
Water2Return project is about to be three years old already, and the partners have met to get updated on the last project developments and reorganise the project activities and draft a contingency plan to overcome the COVID-19 crisis. This is a critical point not only for us, but for all running projects, specially those comprising relevant technological development, demonstration and testing, such as Water2REturn. In addition to this main topic, the meeting also took into account innovation, intellectual property, market penetration and communication activities.
This event took place during two consecutive days:
April, 1st. COVID-19 crisis contingency plans have been the main focus of this first day. In this sense, the most critical part of the project is the finalisation of the system’s installation process at Matadero del Sur. Thus, pending tasks were revised per each treatment line, and a weekly calendar collecting the time needed for completing each task (counting week 1 as the first in which it is possible to enter the site normally) has been prepared. It will be included in the documentation needed to complete the open amendment, in which a project extension is being requested.
Innovation and IP protection is a key issue generally speaking for the project, but especially relevant now that we are about to start having results. Therefore, a special session devoted to the identification of additional Key Exploitable Results (KERs) or the rewriting and shaping of those already included at the proposal stage was held. The partners were asked to think about the treatment lines of which they are responsible for, and look for relevant innovations in each of them. Furthermore, not only innovations related to the treatment lines may be identified; all partners were also asked to look for additional KERs apart from the technological ones.
Field tests is another activity seriously affected by COVID-19 crisis, as the agronomic products’ manufacturing depends on finalising the system installation, and it is not possible to know right now when it will be possible to travel across Europe to perform these field tests, so any planning can be made yet.
Work performed on LCA and social LA has also been revised, and some work has been assigned to the partners to go on with the two studies.
During the afternoon, the partners worked individually on both LCA + social LCA and KERs definition, and the results would be shared the following day.
April, 2nd. After a discussion on the work done individually by the partners in the previous afternoon, stakeholders’ engagement and communication and dissemination activities were presented and discussed. One of the key dissemination activities discussed has been the preparation of the second issue of the project newsletter, that is meant to be released before the end of the month.
Last but not least, a General Assembly meeting including a voting session was held. Relevant issues for the project mostly at administrative level were discussed and voted.
We expect next project meeting takes place in Seville, as it should have happened with this one, and that Water2REturn system is ready to be shown to the partners and producing secondary raw materials for manufacturing agronomic products.
