On November 24-25th 2021, the Run4Life consortium gathered in Helsingborg and online for their last General Assembly meeting – a few days before the official end of the project on November 30th. In the afternoon of the 25th, the official final project event took place, hosted by project partner NSVA in Helsingborg at the RecoLab.
The workshop was organised by NSVA, in cooperation with project partner LeAF and invited moderator Mats Johansson of Ecoloop. Five European sites where source separated wastewater systems are implemented shared their experiences to ease similar implementation at other locations. Together, the houses, offices and other buildings at the five locations include around 3500 users. The aim of the workshop was to bring interested key stakeholders such as municipalities and water authorities directly into contact with the site managers, and highlight the circular advantages of taking the source-separation approach. The short time in which the workshop was fully booked is a sign of great interest in the use of this kind of wastewater management systems. Over 60 people from different countries in Europe participated in the Replication Workshop, to learn and discuss about replication of source separated wastewater systems and the resource recovery approach of Run4Life. The on-site workshop in Helsingborg was accompanied by an online satellite event hosted by LeAF, enabling participants to watch a livestream of the event.
The workshop programme was as follows:
| 12:00 – 13:00h | Lunch and guided tour of RecoLab |
| 13:00h | Presentations by the site managers of Helsingborg (SE), Ghent (BE), Sneek (NL), Vigo (ES) and Hamburg (DE), followed by a moderated round of questions. |
| 14:00h | Coffee break |
| 14:30h | Panel debate with site managers about economic feasibility, legal aspects, technical results, etc |
| 16:00-17:00h | End of program, optional post-workshop drinks |
The workshop was moderated by Mats Johansson Ecoloop (Sweden) and the panel consisted of:
- Hamse Kjerstadius NSVA (Sweden)
- Lieven Demolder CEIP (Belgium)
- Paraschos Chatzopoulos DeSaH (The Netherlands)
- Eva Martinez Diaz Aqualia (Spain)
- Wenke Schoenfelder Hamburg Wasser (Germany)
First the managers of the four Run4Life project demonstration sites briefly presented their main facts and experiences, as well as a representative of the Jenfelder Au site in Hamburg, Germany. A moderated panel debate followed, during which the five demo-site representatives answered questions about the challenges and opportunities related to building their demo-sites, focusing on financial and regulatory aspects. The end of the panel debate focused on aspects that are important in replication of the concepts in other cities and engaged the participants to share their own developments in setting up a circular sanitation project. Besides the presentation and debates, the participants had the opportunity of a guided tour of the RecoLab facilities and to engage with the panellists and among each other and exchange ideas during the breaks and after the workshop. The workshop presentations have been compiled into one file and can be found here.
After each presentation the workshop participants were asked to use coloured papers to express their opinion about the implemented concept they just learned about, indicating whether they deemed that particular system feasible or interesting for their own city or project. In addition, throughout the entire workshop an online Menti board was available on which all participants both in Helsingborg and online could post questions related to source-separation in general and the five sites in particular. All of the posted questions were gathered by the workshop organisers and analysed. Duplicate or very similar questions were grouped, and those that had not been answered during the workshop were distributed among the site managers and the communications manager of the Run4Life project. A follow-up document was prepared with the answers to the questions.