The agri-food sector especially the meat processing industry is one of the biggest global water consumer and effluent producer. This trend is expected to increase as the world’s global population will increase by 2.2 billion people by 2050 requiring a 50 percent increase in the production of food. Many agri-food industries already operate their own wastewater treatment plants which can exceed the environmental standards due to the strengthening of regulation and threaten the receiving ecosystems’ good ecological status. During dry seasons, many industries actually have to store their secondary effluent in large lagoons as the rivers which usually receive this secondary effluent are not able to cope with the discharged pollutant load. An innovative way to improve effluent treatment is to install Floating Treatment Wetlands (FTW) on these existing lagoons as a complementary tertiary treatment. This innovative nature-based solution, can easily be integrated into existing lagoons without the need for heavy civil or levelling work. A FTW is a hydroponic vegetated device typically installed on the surface of a pond without the need for structural changes. It is comprised of a floating mat planted with emergent macrophytes. Plant roots grow through the mat and hang into the water column to act as a physical and biological filter for dissolved and particulate pollutants. FTWs recently showed promising treatment performances for nutrients, metals, suspended solids and emerging pollutants like pharmaceuticals. However most of the reported studies were small scale experiments, mainly using synthetic effluent not representative of the agi-food sector and did not provide any design guidelines which slows down its implementation. The overall aim of the project is to assess in a pilot scale experiment, representative of a real application (real effluent, continuous feeding), the effectiveness of a customized FTW to remove nutrients (N, P) for the agri-food sector. Moreover, in a context of decreasing phosphorus world resources, a specific material will be integrated into the FTW to recover this nutrient for future usage (i.e soil fertilizer). A particular attention will be paid to the product’s end of life favouring materials easy to be recycled or reused. A life cycle assessment will help selecting the adequate materials and manufacturing process to guarantee the low environmental foot print of the FTW. The pilots will be big enough to extrapolate results and provide research-based design guidelines to optimize FTWs’ size with respect to input load and expected treatment target. Design (sizing tool) and maintenance guidelines will be developed which will guarantee adequate implementation and operation of FTWs to meet environmental standards. Furthermore, a deep assessment of the most suitable energy route for the harvested vegetation and treated water reuse for various applications (e.g. irrigation and/or low quality cleaning) will be performed to close the loop in a circular economy perspective. The outcome of the project will be to develop a robust and marketable product. It will be the first 100% recyclable FTW that can, on top of the phytoremediation processes involved (nutrient removal), allow easy P recovery for subsequent usage (e.g. soil fertilizer). There is no such product to date available on the market (neither in France nor abroad). At a national level, nearly 7000 agri-food industries have been identified as potential end-users which warrant the need for such a research project.

This joint laboratory project "MIXI-LAB" refers to VMI company (Vendée Mécanique Industrie) and ONIRIS-UMR CNRS 6144 GEPEA. It aims at developing innovative solutions for dispersion / mixing. VMI is a major player in the mixing industry while UMR GEPEA (A + AERES / 2011) has a process engineering experience. Mixing and structuring based on liquid and solid ingredients systems (powders), poses particular problems found in food, pharmaceutical, cosmetics, etc. A mixer consists of a container (reactor) and one or more tools that will set motion and contact between solid, liquid &gas. The design of the reactor & tool is often based on experience combined with an intuitive approach. Different physicochemical constraints are involved such as shear, elongation, the solid-solid and solid-liquid affinities, solubilization of solids, chemical reactions .... The energy and viscous dissipation results from tool-reactor-products interactions. In this traditional industry, the use of sensors is minimal and is often limited to global data (energy), offline sensors, or based on at the discretion of the operator. MIXI-LAB aims at: 1) Establishment of a scientific approach based on physical models for optimizing and scaling up continuous and batch mixers. This development will be supported by a database (combining models and data from tests) that will be implemented and enriched by the experimental data collected on test protocols with models and real products. The final goal is to store the knowledge and develop extrapolation tools to strengthen VMI’s development and expertise. 2) Development of a sensor offer. The objective is to improve supervision, optimize the energy provided in function accurate data determining the degree of completion of a dispersion-mixture operation. Various technologies and approach should allow on-line control (continuous systems) and batch operation ("software-sensor" approach). 3) The development of a background study on the interaction between reactor headspace & material undergoing mixing. This approach will focus i) on the consumption of certain gases (oxygen, other) in order to control the gas intake during mixing, ii) the development of breakthrough technologies to the introduction of minor ingredients (improvers, fillers, plasticizers ...) and iii) on innovative ways of incorporating liquid phases. The incorporation strategy for minor ingredients is to be solved especially for continuous mixers. 4) Optimization and extrapolation of the reactor / tool with two targets; for batch systems by adopting multi tool techniques to better control the shear and for continuous mixer to better understand the involved phenomena and develop a range of continuous mixer with extrusion-expansion capabilities. In the long term, it is envisaged to develop continuous mixer adapted to food and non food application to be implemented in co-extrusion systems for mastering 2D-3D matrices and the 3D printer technology type. Two application areas are targeted: bakery (M1 to M36) & non-food (cosmetics, biotech…) after the first 36 months. The major challenge for VMI is to switch to a scientific approach for equipment design, to successfully bridge the evolution towards continuous systems and to develop a sensor-based process supervision.

Who has never enjoyed the smell of a wood fire during a winter walk? In fact, behind this positive feeling, you smell the good odor of benzene or naphatlene which are nothing but VOCs and PAHs emitted during the combustion of wood. These compounds can be found in the atmosphere in gaseous form or adsorbed on the surface of soot particles emitted during wood combustion (WC). To put it another way, although wood energy is considered a green energy that is carbon neutral, it is not without impact on both the environment and human health. Indeed, air pollution, especially particulate pollution, is responsible for 48,000 deaths each year in France and more than 400,000 deaths in Europe. It is mainly the fine particles (PM2,5) which are pointed out, they are more numerous and more dangerous because of their propensity to penetrate deeply into the body and to go up to the pulmonary alveoli/blood exchange. These are mainly emitted by the residential sector, and more precisely, by domestic wood-burning appliances. It is to be noted that wood-energy is the first renewable energy in the energy mix both in France and in Europe. This sector represents 10% of the total European energy mix (2016). In view of these data and, taking into account the substantial effort required by Europe for the development of renewable energies, the part of wood energy in the final energy mix must be multiplied by 2 by 2030 to achieve those objectives. Since energy transition must not lead to human health and environment threats, the European Union has tightened requirements concerning the emissions of WC appliances with the Ecodesign directive which took effect in january 2022. This directive fixes the values of the emissions (gaseous pollutants and particles) to be respected by the residential combustion system put on the market in the future. Considering the lifetime of this kind of appliances and the current range of solutions, it is urgent to offer an innovative and novel retrofit solution that will really impact air quality at the level of the emissions. Two kinds of particules are emitted by wood residential wood combustion (RWC) : 1) “primary” particles which are directly emitted by the combustion process, 2) the “secondary” particles which are formed in the atmosphere from gaseous precursors as VOC or PAH. The grand challenge of the WC sector is on developing a remediation system able to simultaneously decrease fine particles and some gaseous pollutants. OLLIWOOD will be the project that will offer to suppliers the potential to develop a functionalized media allowing simultaneous decrease of particles and gaseous pollutants emitted by the RWC. If successful, OLLIWOOD will open the path to the future adoption of such novel media by developing a system which is adapted to residential use which means that the process must be designed in order to limit the drop pressure, the maintenance, the cost and the size. For that, our starting hypothesis is on developing a process that would involve the oxidizing potential of the particles resulting from WC and finally concretized all the research that has been performed on the oxidative potential of particles. By definition, the oxidative potential of particles is their capacity to induce a secondary reaction with other components. Based on the properties of the particles, the target is to develop a remedial process allowing to oxydise the particles to avoid clogging the filter. In order to give itself the means to complete this project, the considering consortium should consist of 6-7 partners with complementary skills and experimental facilities whose interaction in this project is essential to achieve the objectives of this proposal. Currently 4 partners have responded favorably (IMT-Atlantique, CSTB, LORFLAM and Eastern University of Finland), 1 is under discussion (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano) and 2 are being contacted (Technical University of Denmark and Instituto de Carboquemica).

Human activities are the source of many long-lived physical and chemical contaminants, such as persistent organic pollutants (POP), trace metals (TM) and microplastics (MPl). Knowledge of their individual dangers and their levels of environmental exposure is quite well documented, but all of these substances represent a cocktail to which the population is chronically exposed through the consumption of seafood, and whose effects synergistic effects on human health are little or not known. Microplastics notably have the capacity to adsorb TM and POP, to modify their transport, their physicochemical transformations and modify their toxicological effects known individually. Our project aims to analyze the hazards represented by these cocktails of substances, focusing on two families of plastics frequently found in mussels (polyethylene and polypropylene), the most classic POPs (polychlorinated biphenyls PCBs, organochlorine pesticides and perfluorinated substances) and trace metals (cadmium, lead, mercury). With the help of a multidisciplinary partnership (ecotoxicology, physico-chemistry, analytical chemistry, cellular toxicology and metal chemistry), our objective is therefore 1) to characterize the chemical exposome carried by each family of plastics from their formation in the marine environment until their ingestion by humans, via animals, 2) to characterize their consequences on the health of the mussel, and the effects on humans by monitoring biomarkers of liver functions and immune.

With 5 million Kg / day of organic pollution produced in Europe (World Bank, 2012 Gani and Scrimgeour, 2014) and climate change, humanity will face a water shortage. Therefore, sustainable management of wastewater and drinking water will go through an anticipation of the pollution and its effects before a major accident. This expectation is based on reliable measurements of both pollutants themselves but especially their effects on biological organisms (toxic and ecotoxic effects of mixtures for example) but that is not the only answer to the problem. Indeed, a global response of the water management also depends on the ability to produce data and to build reliable evaluation of risk scenarios. We propose the creation of a joint laboratory RIMAE to develop and industrialize microbial biosensors capable of measuring the toxic effects in an innovative approach by creating pollution footprint. RIMAE gathers the complementarity of knowledge from the laboratory GEPEA UMR CNRS (CBAC team) specialist in microbial biosensors with the electronics company internationally recognized Tronico-ALCEN to work in complementarity at the interface of their areas of excellence. The hybrid systems that will be developed allow the acquisition of information from living organisms to characterize the toxicity and networks of biosensors will also be deployed in combination with traditional sensors. The aim is to devise a mapping in real time in order to help the management of the natural resource and industrial water. The proximity of the two partners, the complementarity of their approach, their common culture of innovation and research guarantee an ambitious vision in the form of three founding pillars: - To provide the market with technologies from the GEPEA team by using a panel of different microorganisms (bioluminescent bacteria, yeasts, algae) to build a fingerprint of the effluent toxicity. This approach lasting three years will use the expertise of GEPEA but in an industrial logic to ensure a robust solution of the measuring device. - To develop the networking of biosensors by addressing the issues of the transfer of data in a secure manner and in a long distance and the battery life expectancy. The set of biosensors should communicate with existing satellite systems. - To prepare the future of microbial biosensors by extending the concept of pollution footprint to a new mode of action. Including Raman spectroscopic sensors that generate a sophisticated chemical fingerprint for each microorganism. This new approach will develop a "3D vision" of the toxic effect (cells / screening effect / identification of cellular targets).