Clean Water
Clean Water was about creating a vital Baltic Sea Region platform developing innovative business product and services tackling the different challenges within the water sector. The long-term vision of Clean Water is to jointly form an open and dynamic network called BSR Stars Clean Water Excellency Network around the Baltic Sea Region: It cooperates in creating a supportive platform for all the ten member countries to get business opportunities on global markets. It will use best available scientific expertise combined with innovative technologies and services in order to create and implement successful business products and models.
The strategic idea about Clean Water was to commercialize and brand it’s members’ innovations. That was supported by using all the levels of BSR countries national innovation systems from policy level to simple export tools. The platform not only provided information about business opportunities, legislation, financial instruments and cooperation tools and possibilities but also aimed to influence and change the background elements that are creating the current operating environment. One example was to for example influence the decision-makers by providing information about hazardous chemicals, current legislation and its implementation in different BSR-countries thus creating a need to purchase best available technologies in order to tackle the different challenges in water sector.
The results of the Clean Water consortia were based on a strong partnership between leading research and cluster organizations within the BSR water sector. During the three year initial piloting phase the Institute of Oceanology in Poland and the Kaunas University of Technology in Lithuania provided mappings and measurements on the distribution of nutrients and hazardous chemicals in the Baltic Sea. This shared knowledge has not only been fundamentally essential when influencing the political decision makers in the BSR and EU but also important when involving the different cluster members in developing their joint competitive and innovative technology for future waste water treatment. This has also been recognized in Saint Petersburg who sent their management board of Russian Vodokanal on a Tour de Nordic with Clean Water aiming to learn the best practices and new ideas from waste water treatment plants in Finland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The tour was started by initially sending the Scandinavian researchers and entrepreneurs from Clean Water platform to St Petersburg to discover the existing Russian water solutions and the market and the water related opportunities in St. Petersburg and Russia.
The result of this exercise led to a strengthening research collaboration ending to eleven new collaboration partners, amongst them e.g. IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute. In addition, the collaboration team succeeded in joining to the leading international research networks such as the EU Network ”Conceiving Wastewater Treatment in 2020 – Energetic, environmental and economic challenges” and the “International Network for Sustainable Urban Waterfront Development”.
The partners and associated partners in Clean Water were: The Institute of Oceanology, Polish Academy of Sciences IO PAS (Poland), Kaunas University of Technology (Lithuania), Lahden Seudun Kehitys LADEC Oy (Finland), Sustainable Sweden Southeast AB (Sweden), Baltic China Science park Network (Sweden), ChemSec (Sweden), IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute (Sweden), Linnaeaus University; Faculty of Health and Life Sciences (Sweden).