The Slovenian company AlgEn, a partner in the project, dedicated to algae technology, participates in the Saltgae consortium meeting, a European project that works on the development and demonstration of a technologically and economically viable solution to the use of algae for the treatment of saline wastewater from the food industry. Treating saline wastewater in the presence of organic content represents a challenge for many industrial sectors.
This meeting took place between March 19 and 21, 2018, in Ljubljana (Slovenia), and brought together fourteen companies and more than 40 people from eight different countries.
The Algaecan project shares with this project the use of algae to achieve its mission, the viability of a sustainable treatment of wastewater from the fruit and vegetable processing industry, through the cultivation of heterotrophic microalgae. These types of microalgae require organic compounds for their nutrition and grow in the absence of light. They have great potential to remove organic carbon and various types of nitrogen and phosphorous compounds from wastewater, which use it as a source of carbon and energy without the need for sunlight. Later these microalgae will serve as raw material for the production of biofertilizers, animal feed, etc.