Sustainable Concepts Towards a Zero Outflow Municipality (Zer0-M),

a project in the

 

Euro-Mediterranean Regional Programme For Local Water Management

Zer0-M aimed at concepts and technologies to achieve optimised close-loop usage of all water flows in small municipalities or settlements (e.g. tourism facilities) not connected to a central wastewater treatment - the Zero Outflow Municipality (Zer0-M).

Several technologies are already available, which allow efficient wastewater treatment and re-use without hygienic risks on a low-cost and easy-to-handle level. These include sanitation systems with low water consumption, separation of grey and black water, biological treatment of grey water and reuse for non-drinking purposes (e.g. irrigation), bio-membrane reactors for intense treatment, constructed wetlands for extensive treatment, sludge hygienisation for re-use as fertiliser. The beneficiary countries were Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey.

The project consortium consisted of 10 partners from these four Mediterranean Partner Countries (MPC) and the EU-countries Italy, Austria and Germany and comprised environmental NGOs, non-profit professional organisations and research institutions.

Target groups of the project were experts from administration, planning and engineers. Awareness raising measures additional target on schools and interested public.
Zer0-M wanted to enable one centre in each country to implement and disseminate SWM solutions and to promote the technologies and the approach among authorities and consumers. Main issues to be taken into consideration were:

• Function, treatment performance and maintenance requirements of existing SWM technologies
• Integrated concepts for different applications of decentralised waste water treatment and re-use
• small settlements in rural areas with agricultural production
• isolated tourism facilities
• peri-urban areas not connected to a centralised waste water collection and treatment system .
• Hygienic aspects and good practice to avoid health hazards, with special regard on re-use of wastewater and sludge for irrigation and fertilisation.
• Costs and tariffing.

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