Raquel Garcia and Serena Molina are the authors

Desalination using membrane filtration has established itself in the last decade as a mature and well established technology in the international market. But sooner or later, the membranes lose their properties with respect to water permeability and its ability to reject salts and organic matter. Currently disposed membranes are stored in landfills.

Are there alternatives for its management? There are recycling initiatives for the constituent materials of the membranes and for the membranes themselves. In this sense, IMDEA Water, with SADYT and VALORIZA, are developping the project LIFE 13 ENV/ES/000751 TRANSFOMEM ways of recycling disposed membranes, processing and transforming them into nanofiltration and ultrafiltration membranes.

Read the article, written by Raquel García and Serena Molina, researchers at IMDEA Water, in iAgua Magazine issue 8.

TRANSFOMEM is a project funded under the LIFE + financial instrument  (contract n. LIFE13 ENV/ES/000751)  ​