Research & development

Continuous R&D with universities and industry partners, backed by EU and Hungarian funding, to return water, energy and nutrients to the circular economy.

We invest in research and development continuously, because that is where competitive processes come from. Numerous processes have come out of that work, been patented, and gone on to be sold in their own right.

Much of it runs inside funded programmes: the EU's FP7 and Horizon frameworks, and the Hungarian NVKP, GINOP and KFI schemes. We work with universities, research institutes and businesses large and small, and the aim throughout is to put water, nutrients and energy back into the circular economy rather than send them to disposal.

Current and recent threads: LTDis® low-temperature distillation, developed with Swiss partner Thermal Purification Technologies and taken to industrial scale by UTB; forward osmosis piloted with Aquaporin and HIDROFILT; anaerobic membrane bioreactors for ultra-high-strength streams; reNEW, a patented biothermal two-step process to ferment and extract volatile fatty acids (VFA) and nutrients (NPK) from biosolids; new work on PFAS and micropollutant removal; and CYCLE, a range of patent-pending, bio-based cleaning products developed by our spin-off reNEW, made with sophorolipid biosurfactants, enzymes and recycled water, and now sold direct to consumers, rated 4.85 out of 5 across nearly 1,400 customer reviews.