Thursday September 7, the event Making Waves will be held on the iconic Afsluitdijk. Wetsus has been selected by a jury to make a full pitch about the NaFRAd project. Only 17 out of over 50 projects get this chance, that also makes them a candidate for the finals of Ideas From Europe.
Making Waves will be opened with a keynote speech by the former secretary-general of the UN, mr. Kofi Annan. After a second keynote by Melanie Schultz van Haegen, Minister of Infrastructure and the Environment, Wetsus’ Leon Korving will present NaFRAd in the first round of pitches. NaFRAd is all about phosphorus.
Phosphorus is an important nutrient needed to sustain a high food production for a growing world population. However, sources of phosphate rock are finite and much of the phosphorus ends up in our surface water. There it is the main cause for eutrophication and (toxic) algae blooms. The US Great Lakes, Florida, the Yellow Sea in China and the Baltic Sea in Europe suffer every year from severe algae blooms. To combat this, phosphorus needs be removed to very low concentrations at a reasonable cost. Wetsus has developed the NaFRAd technology that can do exactly this with a very small footprint. At the same time it recovers the phosphorus in re-useable products so that we can sustain our food production in the long run.
