On March 10, 2022, the LIFE Brine-Mining workshop was successfully held online with the participation of Veolia, a transnational company with activities in water management, waste management, and energy security, THERMOSSOL, a company with expertise in constructing steam boilers, the Silesian University of Technology in Poland, and inspiring European projects promoting fresh ideas on wastewater treatment and water purification: LIFE REMINE WATER, LIFE DESIROWS, and WATER MINING HORIZON. Representatives from the above-mentioned companies, institutes, and projects presented their works on the evaporation technologies for wastewater minimization! In total, 33 people attended the workshop. Among the participants were members of the LIFE Brine-Mining consortium and students from NTUA.

The workshop began with the LIFE Brine-Mining project presentation by Miss Maria Avramidi, PhD candidate at NTUA, on designing and constructing a MED evaporator for the treatment of coal mine wastewater. Mr Fabregat Tena, the representative of the LIFE DESIROWS project, presented the impact of integrating renewable energies in desalination and denitrification processes on their sustainability and economic competitiveness. Then, Miss Christina Xenogianni, representative of the WATER MINING HORIZON project and owner of THERMOSSOL, a company with great expertise in evaporators, spoke on the challenges of constructing a MED evaporator. Mr Giovanni Silvestri, the representative of EVALED company, presented the selection criteria and case studies in the mining industry about evaporation technology. Dr. Krzysztof Mitko, the representative of the Silesian University of Technology in Poland, presented a system comprising reverse osmosis, vapor compression, and crystallization for salt production. Lastly, Mrs Claudia Pastor Morell, from CETAQUA, representative of the LIFE REMINE WATER project, presented the minimum liquid discharge and by-product recovery in the mining industry. The conclusions that came up from the workshop were that the evaporators are one of the most important compartments for a Zero Liquid Discharge system. However, their construction is accompanied by some difficulties. A challenge to face is their high energy consumption, even if some heat exchange technologies are demonstrated to be sustainable. To overcome this challenge, scientists and companies focus on adding pre-treatment stages before the saline effluent will be treated by the evaporator. To remove this barrier, the best solution is to couple the evaporator with renewable energy sources. The LIFE Brine-Mining partners thanked all the participants and renewed the date for the project’s upcoming events!