Athens (Greece)

The demo site

The city of Athens has suffered rapid (uncontrolled) urbanization resulting in few urban green spaces which coupled with a series of peri-urban forest fires in the last decade have resulted in a severe degradation of its environment and the quality of life of its inhabitants. The public good approach to quality of life, offered by urban and peri-urban green spaces is all the more important due to a more general quality of life degradation, which is the result of an ongoing financial crisis. What is seen as priority is the deployment of innovative management options and technologies for reuse needed to irrigate (primarily) green urban areas.

What is being tested?

In Athens, demonstration will look into sewer mining, as a novel concept for distributed reuse within the urban environment, exploiting state-of-art Information and Communication Technology solutions for distributed monitoring and management of these multiple sites combined with small packaged plants. The demo site will also be used as a test bed for testing reused water characteristics on the soil, irrigating onsite peri-urban green. Finally, the demo site will examine a major component of ecosystem services (ESS) specifically relevant for arid regions: the mitigation of heat island effects due to irrigation of urban green.

All this presents a unique opportunity for (a) drastically increasing reuse within the highly constrained urban environment (b) improving urban quality of life through improved ecosystem services and (c) creating a new market for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that can provide this service to, e.g local municipalities, using the existing centralised sewerage network of the water company as a resource to be tapped into. Find a VIDEO about sewer mining at the Athens demo site here.

Contact for the demo site:  Prof. Christos Makropoulos, NTUA (cmakro@mail.ntua.gr)