At a session open to all tanner members and aimed particularly at tanneries with an unhairing process, the company Igualadina de Depuració i Recuperació SL (IDR) and Leather Cluster Barcelona set out how the water regeneration station (ERA) project has developed in recent months.

At the meeting, held on 30 November at Adoberia Bella, the headquarters of Leather Cluster Barcelona, Bernat Vilarrubias, manager of IDR and president of the cluster, gave the tanneries details of the good results obtained by the research carried out by A3 Leather Innovation Center at the Igualada-UdL University Campus into the regenerated water from the IDR treatment plant, and of the latest progress on the ERA project.

It should be recalled that during April, after a few months of fine-tuning, the ERA pilot plant began production and the first tanks of regenerated water were delivered to the Igualada tanning industries, mainly for laboratory testing.

The tests carried out with 4 types of water obtained at different stages of the ultrafiltration, nanofiltration and osmosis membranes, applied to the tanning process, show that ultrafiltered water can cover 50% of water needs with good results in terms of quality and at an affordable price.

Therefore, today, months on from intensive work and research, IDR is focusing its efforts on producing ultrafiltered regenerated water for use in the tanneries' unhairing process, at laboratory level and in industrial batches. Once its viability on an industrial scale has been confirmed, consideration will be given to building the first modular plant of 500 m3/day, expandable according to the sector's needs.

Within the horizon of Zero Waste in the tanning industry, and in a context in which the growing problem of water supply in Catalonia is a serious concern, Vilarrubias stressed the importance of this project for giving treated water a second life.

We are currently suffering the consequences of climate change, with continuous episodes of drought causing rivers and reservoirs all over the world to fall to historic lows. And the problem is not only that there is very little rainfall, but that aquifers and wells everywhere are running dry and cannot be recharged.

Against this serious backdrop, IDR and Leather Cluster Barcelona are developing this ambitious project to build an (ERA), which consists of treating the effluent from the IDR treatment plant (the water leaving the plant once already treated) in order to obtain a flow of ultrafiltered water and also osmosis-treated water (practically pure water) and another of salt water, all reusable by the tanning industry or for other purposes.

In this respect, the Catalan Water Agency (ACA) has for years been committed to the use of non-conventional resources in order to increase water security and availability. One of these is regenerated water, obtained by applying an additional treatment to water that has already been treated, using facilities known as tertiary treatments or Water Regeneration Stations (ERA). Through treatments such as reverse osmosis, ultrafiltration and nanofiltration, these tertiary facilities give the water a quality suitable for various uses.

Leather Cluster Barcelona is an environment of competitive cooperation for promoting cross-cutting, transformative strategic projects with the aim of driving forward the ecosystem of the Catalan leather sector. The cluster is an accredited entity within the Catalonia Clusters programme and has the support of Acció.