CRETUS researcher Juan M. Garrido, winner of the ‘Fernando Calvet Prats’ Technology Transfer Award

The Royal Galician Academy of Sciences and the Galician Innovation Agency have conferred the ‘Fernando Calvet Prats’Technology Transfer Award on an innovative technology for extracting struvite from wastewater. This technology was developed by Dafne Crutchik, a professor at the Adolfo Ibáñez University in Santiago, Chile, and Juan M. Garrido, a principal investigator at CRETUS, part of the CIGUS Network, an initiative launched by the regional government (Xunta de Galicia) that groups together centres of accredited scientific excellence.

Legislation requires the elimination of phosphorus from wastewater in treatment plants, but it is also possible to recover and reuse it as a valuable resource. Among the components of phosphorus, struvite stands out as a highly sought-after mineral in the European Union, particularly as an agricultural fertilizer. This technology, protected by two patents (one Spanish and one European), has been successfully transferred to the company Aqualia.

The Fernando Calvet Prats Technology Transfer Award, endowed with €5,000, recognises both the research group that developed the transferred technology — in this case, the Environmental Biotechnology Group (BioGroup) at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) — and the winning company, Aqualia.

The award ceremony will take place on 19^th June at 7 p.m. at Pazo de San Roque manor house in Santiago de Compostela.