 Thank you, dear. Ladies and gentlemen, about a century ago, somebody made a rather remarkable discovery. He took water, foul-smelling water, and bubbled some air through it, and the bad odor disappeared. And then a little bit later, it was found that this aerated water, if you let it settle, the suspended solids disappeared. And so the technology developed further. It was found by some tricks that we could make the ammonia disappear. And a little bit later, it was found that ammonia became nitrate, but we found tricks to make it disappear. And then also, we learned how to make phosphorus disappear, and micro pollutants. And most of all, we learned to make the matrix itself, the foul water, becoming then an effluent, which we could discharge. We learned how to make it disappear. So our profession is a little bit like the magician in the circus. We can make things disappear. Actually, we are masters in technology to make things disappear. My title is about transition. Transition is not something which goes gradual. It's not evolution. It's something which actually has an element of shock therapy. It means that you are willing to go up front to the start some century ago. And see, if we took the right route, if we indeed had to go west or east and not the other way. Actually, transition means that you ask questions about something that nobody questions at this moment about. For instance, I will emphasize the question about nitrogen. We now take it for granted. We think it's the epitome of our technology to make it disappear, to destroy it entirely. We should ask that question today. And actually, transition means that we are willing to think forward in totally new ways. And for those of you who are a little bit on the conservative side, indeed, you smell that there is heresy in the air at this moment. Let's talk about the topics now specifically. Actually, when we talk about transition and resource recovery, we have to start with energy. And I will say a few words about that. And then I will indeed, without being negative about it, I will talk about incremental things and what I call the old line of water treatment. Then we talk about some mavericks, but they are still, without being negative, in the old line. And then I really deal with what I call the step forward, the water factory. And particularly, I should draw your attention that we should start thinking from the pull side, not from the push side. I finish then with some considerations on the newly started cluster on resource recovery. Let's go to the first type of resource that we should recover, energy. But before we do that, let's face the fact. Actually, the water industry consumes about 1% of the overall electricity. 1%. 1%? Really? There are lots of other things that consume energy. And here, for our wastewater technology that we develop and that we are so proud about, it consumes 1%. That's a lot. Secondly, the energy costs are increasing, and they arise now already to something like 20%. And the major culprit is something that we adore from the morning till the evening, in which we call activated sludge. Now, another element in the resource recovery is indeed that this used water contains a number of other things. First of all, there is the energy, clear? That's, first of all, there is the water, I should say. That's the most important one we calculated that this represents something like 65 euro per inhabitant per year. And then there are the energy, the energy in the form of heat, and the energy also in the form of organics. And then there are other elements like the nitrogen, the phosphorus, but also the carbon, which we could recover in the form of char. Overall, we talk about 80, 85 euro per inhabitant per year, which at this moment we do not really focus on. The nagging problem, if we take energy and those other goodies which are there, the nagging problem is that not only the STP today is energy demanding, but it dissipates the used water. Rather than reusing the resources it contains. So the current STP sewage treatment plan destroys these resources. And actually it is, if you agree with me or not, you are free to think your own way, but I think it is this unsustainable character and the indirect contribution to climate change of the current sewage treatment plan more than its energy use as such, which is the key challenge. If we are honest with our profession, we have to say that we do not such an excellent job at all. We should be willing to rethink it from the beginning all the way. So the mission of, when we talk about resource recovery, the mission is really to recover energy, to recover water, to recover valuables from used industrial and municipal water so that the water cycle technology helps to obey the major challenge of sustainability. I'm climate change, that's the way we see it and that's the way we have branded the mission of the cluster on resource recovery. I indeed think that we are doing a good job and I'm not negative about it, but I label them incremental. Some examples, we do things about heat recovery at the house, underground thermal storage. We sieve out cellulose, have 40% less sludge and make something which is bioplastics. We can use microbial fuel cells and bio-electrochemical systems to recover energy and chemicals, good. We do all kinds of novel sludge pre-treatments so that we get more gas from it, all very good, but it is all in the old line. And then, yes, we have mavericks on which we really become very happy about and I have listed here a few and I'll cover them with you very briefly. Nereida, beautiful, 20% lower construction cost, 30% less energy consumption, but no focus on real recovery, at least the way I see it. You can do all kinds of retrofitting, retrofitting in the sense of adding to the sewage treatment plant, wind turbines, anaerobic digester photovoltaic cells, beautiful, but not really focusing on recovery. Actually, for countries like Belgium, which will have to scale down three nuclear power plants in the next winter, we might need moments that we really, every percentage of energy used will be valuable and it might be that we will have to shut down our sewage treatment plants to save energy. All of that is beautiful if we can integrate that towards society, but it is all really incremental. Actually, we have also these developments of making green gas and a beautiful story on which I will come back later is that you can take green energy, you can do electrolysis of big green energy, you can do electrolysis, you have hydrogen that comes then and you can use it, the hydrogen, to upgrade your biogas to green gas. All very nice developments, but all very incremental. Something that buggers me is the nitrogen and yes, we destroy it now through something which is a very efficient process, nitrification, demanding energy, denitrification, using some chemical energy. There are now some shortcuts. Olam, Nas and Amox, Demon, but they still use some of those goodies. There are other processes which have been proposed, can do even reforming of ammonia, but let me draw your attention to the last paragraph. Nitrogen as a recovery product at this moment is a total failure in our business. Yet, ladies and gentlemen, a staggering figure is the following. 2% of the world energy, not of the electricity, of the total energy goes to ammonia formation by the Haber-Bosch process and this is mainly directed to become fertilizer, to become food and that food ends up in our sewage treatment plants. Now what do we do with it? You all know it. Now, another maverick is that we focus on phosphorus and there are beautiful processes coming on which you see here, but I like to draw your attention to the following. Indeed, there is always the question of our quality and about the quantities that we produce and when we then ask around who wants the Struvite and at what price, we usually see that we get not more than 10% of the actual value of what is in that Struvite and we have also to dare to face the question, is Struvite the real motive of all these talks or is it the decrease of sludge costs or sludge treatment costs? So what is then the real step forward? The real step forward is that we dare to think that the old linear system which you see here is over. Taking water from nature to the user and then the dissipative treatment and then make it all disappear and go back to nature. I think it's over. We have to go to a cyclic treatment. It water comes to the user and either in a decentralized system or in a large scale centralized system, we reuse everything that is there. Let's have a look a bit closer. On the decentralized system, we have to start to be serious about it. First of all, 20% of the world population struggles at this moment, what I call a sanitation taboo. They don't even dare to talk about it. And I think that the main point is education. And I give praise here to the single foundation that I know that stresses that. I think we need more of those education to reuse the resources present in wastewater. Education is key for the progress in this domain. But this set, and before we raise our finger to those decentralized systems and to those third world countries, I think I like to add the following paragraph. Deep down in our crocodile brain that's somewhere here at the backside, we all are disgusted, ladies and gentlemen, by fecal matter and hence the reuse of materials which have been in contact with it. Let us begin to be honest with ourselves before we point our finger to other people. But we have to do this through education. Now let me talk about the centralized cycle. And the centralized cycle drives on this conventional activated sludge. We know that it has a capex and an OPEX which is significant. We know that it uses energy. We know that it could recover energy but it does it not so often and not so efficient. We know that it could recover nitrogen and phosphorus and potas but it doesn't or very rarely. We know that the carbon which we are very concerned about that it could be stored or transformed to be stored but most of the time we have a biological oxidation to CO2 and the rest of the sludge we incinerate so it's straight away to the CO2 and contributing to the climate change and the water, definitely. It's hardly reused at all. So this brings me to the take home. The centralized wastewater treatment must be redesigned entirely. Ladies and gentlemen, we have now 100 years of conventional activated sludge and I tell you it's enough. What should we think about? We should think about new and urban metabolism. You've heard those figures. 20% of the food is wasted. Wasted? No. And this represents 2 to 3% of the total energy budget. 2 to 3% of the total energy budget. That's a lot. Now what we should do is stand up from our profession and say we can recover most of that energy. There will be always that waste. Let's be frank, there are always foods which are out of date, et cetera but we can from our side step forward and say by co-digestion we can recover it and actually food and kitchen waste can be a driver for the system that I will introduce in a minute. We can already say that we can recover the water, reclaim the water which comes out of a sewage treatment plant and I'm a little bit proud to say that already in the year 2000 at the plenary meeting of the IWA in Paris, we could present that in Belgium. We are able to close the water cycle. We were then already setting up a system from a treatment plant of 80,000 people where the water coming out of the sewage treatment plant and went through some filtration, went through an infiltration and if you are staying three to four weeks at the Belgium coast, at least a certain region, you drink what you discharged. So what we did then at that moment was add something very important to that. You are entering a cycle and you must deal with the concepts of the consumer and we added to that hazard assessment critical control points. We treated us directly as if it is indeed a product of food quality. So this technology has then been further upscaled and this then has become in Singapore the concept of new water. And this concept that water as a resource can be recovered has of course been further developed in many places in the world and actually the LKY prize this year went to a county who really deals on it. Yet we have to be frank about this. It's not that simple. You see immediately in the literature that all kinds of other problems can arise and to build the resistant genes and most of all also cultural habits, ways of thinking about this material which has been in contact with fecal matter. Yet we must continue I think to promote the closing of the water cycle as a top achievement of our water industry. We should be at all instances pushing this and we should be very proud of this. But the real thing that we should change is stop thinking in terms of diluted waste. The idea is, and this we call the major and minor water line technology, the idea is that you can bring the sewage to the sewage treatment plant, do some screening, the cats and the dogs and then immediately you go through a pre-concentration. Don't work on the diluted stream. Go through pre-concentration and with the concentrate you go to that magnificent super technology which is called anaerobic digestion. And through that you can then go through a number of recoveries, recoveries like heat, like biogas, like clean ammonia and like phosphorus ash or biochar. This 10% line there you can apply technology which covers itself. And then the diluted part, I'm sorry, I'm not saying that you should completely abandon conventional activated sludge, but it can be done, finished. Actually, you will say that bioconcentration. Well, it exists. It exists even at full scale. It's the absorption bio-ioration. Lots of things have to be further developed but it can be done and the nucleus is there and there are lots of beautiful things to further work on. Actually, some of you are now saying, yeah, how about the economy? We have been working on that. The total gross costs of about one euro per cubic meter for the M&M technology are comparable to those of the conventional activated sludge. And if you look at the CO2 balance, actually this M&M line cuts the amount of CO2 which is emitted with one to 4%, not a landslide, but very important and in your overall mileage, you can really cover a lot of miles with that. This brings me to the concept of the used water factory, but I have to emphasize that we have to be very much tuned to the demand side of the story. We're always looking from our inside and say, hey, we can do this, but we rarely look the other side of the road and look to those people who say, can you do this? Now, if we ask that question, what are people outside our profession asking? Actually, if you look to the European Union, they say, we should look at metals and rare earths. They are very concerned about that. They say, if you think of resource recovery, also from water, look at these rare earths. They are very important for us. So indeed, there are lots of processes that we can insert in this new line, in this M&M line to recover also those rare earths. Society as a whole, the world is looking at CO2. Say, can we capture CO2? Well, I just give two examples. Biogas, you can take the CO2 and use it as a fertilizer for greenhouse gases. And the study has shown that this is pretty much possible. We should just stand more forward on it. And there has been also very nice examples where you combine CO2 on incineration, bottom ashes, and in this way, really contribute in the direct line to the demand of the public. But I come now back to my nitrogen. Actually, as you know, we are at this moment, and Professor Rosalind on Monday said it very strongly, we are in need of more protein. We all know that as a consumer, we produce 14 grams of nitrogen per day, per inhabitant, which we bring into the sewer. That corresponds with about 100 grams of edible protein, dry matter. At present, this protein comes, as most of you know, mainly from the soil. But there, the amount of land surface is already very much under debate. Or from the high sea. And that's also under debate. There is no stretch on those two major sources. But as Professor Rosalind has said, the 10 billion are inevitable. We will have them. It will not overshoot all that much, but we will have the 10 billion, and they will all demand more protein. So the protein demand at this moment is certainly going to increase enormously. So the demand for highly-nutritive edible protein will rise strongly. Society asks us, can you do something in that line? And I return that question to ourselves, can we do something from the water profession? Well, let me go over a few values. It takes, by the Haber-Bosch process, two liters of fossil fuel to make one kilogram of fertilizer in. It takes a lot of CO2. I'll just concentrate on the fuel. Actually, the problem starts when you bring this fertilizer to the agro system. The soil nitrogen loses nitrogen in all directions. And actually it takes 42 liters of fossil fuel to have one kilogram nitrogen via this soil plant system as a high-quality animal protein on your dish. So I think that we are right so far that we say, so why bother to recover that nitrogen? Add another two liters of fossil fuel equivalent in the conventional activated soil system and dissipate, destroy that nitrogen entirely. Because there is already so much spend on it, let's start it all over. If you look it from that side, you're right. But we do not necessarily have to return with that nitrogen to that soil system. We can do something much better which is close to our profession. We must take a shortcut in the nitrogen cycle and we can do something. We can upgrade that nitrogen, not via the very, very, very inefficient soil system, but through a microbial system which is close to our heart. Has it been done? Some of you will say, fecal matter and food. Where are we? Well, it is done already, ladies and gentlemen. Look here. You know that aquaculture takes protein from the high sea, brings it into the pond where the fishes live and hardly 25% of the very most is then used. 75% is wasted. These people in aquaculture were in utter despair until they then developed a technology which is called a bioflock technology. You add an energy source, carbon, but it can't be any other energy source. And the microbes recenter size, this urea and ammonia, they grow in flocks. The fish feeds on these flocks and actually your nitrogen efficiency doubles. This is called the bioflock and nobody protests about the origin of the fact that when you go to the restaurant, you are eating something which is 50% based on shit. But there are other things. We know that there is lots of very nice nutritive components in biomass and actually you have been hearing about PHB, but PHB can be used for plastics, good for me. But we found that basically when you take such bacteria full of PHB, which you can grow in, for instance, industrial wastewater, without very difficult connotations and these bacteria are excellent as an animal feed. So I'm saying, why not? Why we should link up in our profession also, which we have not done for years with the food and feed cycle. The most intriguing part for me is the following. We can take off peak kilowatt hour. We use it to electrolyze water. We then get oxygen and hydrogen and we get it with 80% energy efficiency and we then use this hydrogen and oxygen and we deliver it to a hydrogenetroph and you have just heard that you can even use nitrocystis for that and this organism, these organisms will then re-synthesize. They take these two molecules, they take these ammonia, these phosphorus, these CO2 from biogas and they make microbial protein, edible microbial protein of high quality, of the quality of the best animal protein. So this concept of power to protein is a line that we are pushing and which we are developing in collaboration with a number of partners. Actually, we should not fool ourselves. When we talk about resource recovery, we will have to be critical and very critical and keep sharp and that means that at any point we will need these tools. LCA, multi-criteria decision, multi-objective genetic algorithms, we should be careful. Lots of things are at stake. We should not make any mistakes but we should go forward with it. Now, turning and finally to the cluster, to the cluster of resource recovery which we launched this week. Actually, what are the resources that we should focus on? Indeed, water. It stays far ahead of everything. Indeed, heat and energy, very important but also nutrients and nutrients which we upgrade again to some very nice biomolecules as I indicated. There is lots of room for serendipity. There are the concepts of fibers, carboxylates, alginate-like products. Indeed, the cluster should open it up to many new things. Also things like lemma which immobilizes nitrogen. There is plenty of room there for innovation. But when we talk about resource recovery, as I emphasized already before, the poolside should predominate. And actually I think we need four shifts. First of all, if we want to recover, we need a concentrated water. So we must think of intensifying inputs in the waterline or in certain parts of the waterline. Things like kitchen, kitchen waste, curbside vegetation, things like that. We must take more load in our systems. We need also another shift, a paradigm shift, the fact that you can recover and reuse something which has been in contact with fecal matter and we should learn to openly communicate about it. We need certainly also a shift in terms of dimensions. As long as we talk about 50 kilogram here and 20 liters there, it makes no sense. We must talk about markets of 10,000 tons minimum and we should also look outside our water profession, the chemical engineering, et cetera. We have to deal with other disciplines. And finally, if we talk about recovery and we have now a little bit and then a little bit, which is out of spec and out of time, it will never work. We have to think of delivering on spec and in time. So the cluster itself was set out this week. There is already a website. And I should say that by coincidence, there will be in this beautiful city of Ghent, a very nice Congress next year. The Congress will take from 30 August to 22 September and it will be organized by Professor Cornel Rabbi who is present here and you're all very much invited to that Congress. Let me come to my conclusions. Bullet point one, the strongest driver for transition is to help to decrease climate change. We should take, we should have our fair share in that movement. Second bullet, we have to redesign the sewage treatment system entirely, I think. Separation at the entry is key. Work on concentrated streams and I think the conventional activated sludge system, beautiful as it is, it is outdated, 100 years enough. Resource recovery from used water is all about optimizing the demand side. Look the other side and see what they want, the European community, the politicians, the public at large. Focus on products for which there is a need, otherwise we keep selling things which nobody wants. We believe in the water factory which number one, deconstructs the incoming materials to unit products, ammonia, CO2, phosphate. But two, captures low cost energy if you want to re-synthesize you need somewhere energy. Captures low cost energy to re-synthesize the latter to valuable biomolecules such as feed protein for instance. And at the end, ladies and gentlemen, what really matters is to make the water cycle technology more sustainable. Yes, that's our duty. And secondly, I come from the university to create new manufacturing, manufacturing practices. Very important, manufacturing practices and jobs. Jobs in resource recovery from water for a next generation of water professionals. I'd like to thank my sparing partners, these three young men and thank you all for listening. Thank you very much. Thank you.