Date & Time: 24/10/2004

The Israeli-Swedish bi-national AquaNano meeting on nanoscience, nanotechnology and water intends to bridge between two communities: water technologists and nanotechnology experts. The AquaNano meeting will provide insight into the state-of-the-art in nanoscience, nanotechnology and water science, and look into the potential of interacting between these fields for improving desalination, purification, monitoring and waste water recovery.
The world leaders declared at the UN Millennium Summit that it is their goal to halve by 2015 the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water. Investment in academic research and commercial R&D is crucial for meeting this goal. Innovations have brought down the cost of desalinated seawater to below € 0.5 per cubic meter. But this price is still too high. Only a very small fraction of the freshwater consumption comes from desalination today. As the technology improves and the populations grow, the need and the market will follow.
Apart from desalination, purification of waste water is an increasingly important issue. The European Union has increased the demands on purification of waste water and a large part of sewage treatment plants will have to be modified. It will be obligatory to remove more substances than earlier, including hormones, medicines and detergents. This involves a capital outlay of many billions of euros, which calls for looking into better and cheaper ways for monitoring and separating compounds out of waste water.
Nanotechnology may well be the next industrial revolution. It exploits the special properties of very small structures (between 1-100nm, 1 nm equals one millionth of a millimeter). Desalination, purification and monitoring of water offer interesting research challenges for nanotechnology. It is a challenge to harness this future technology to solve one of the most important problems that the world is currently facing. New applications are needed to tilt the economic balance for applying desalination and waste water treatment globally. The need is global, and successful applications may compete for a market consisting of the entire world population, using water around the clock, every day.

The meeting will present some of the state-of-the-art nanoscience, nanotechnology and water related research in both Israel and Sweden. It will highlight the options for nanotechnology and water science through cutting edge work in Israel and Sweden. A concluding panel will try to point out some possible ways to exploit nanotechnology for water applications.

The workshop is open to the public by prior registration. You may register by phoning Ms Ruttie Hasson (02) 567-6230 or Ms Ruth Hanucca (02) 567-6200
- or by email:ruth@academy.ac.il

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