A Scottish Water lorry will soon pull up in a rural village with a mobile lab designed to grow custom sewage-eating microbes on the spot. This project tackles a gap in water infrastructure: centralised treatment plants are expensive to build and run, and they leak carbon. For remote communities—from UK islands to the Amazon—off-grid systems could be cheaper and cleaner, but nobody knows how to design them reliably. The team will use high-throughput synthetic biology to evolve bespoke microbial communities that break down waste in local conditions, then pair them with low-cost sensors and adaptive controls that let the system run itself. If it works, rural and off-grid communities could get water treatment that is low-carbon, locally controlled, and far cheaper than a pipe to the nearest city. Scottish Water is co-funding demonstrators; Northumbrian and Welsh Water are watching. The researchers also aim to rewrite building regulations and utility business models so that decentralised systems become a standard option, not a niche experiment. The goal is to make Sustainable Development Goal 6—clean water for everyone—reachable without wrecking the climate.
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This Programme Grant will accelerate the delivery of decentralised water technologies by bringing the most up-to-date bioscience and energy engineering to bear. It will re-write emerging design rules for engineering biology to ensure that off-grid environmental biotechnologies can be configured with confidence. Bespoke microbial treatment communities will be evolved using a new suite of high-throughput synthetic-biology inspired, experimental platforms. For rural populations and UK Islands and in the developing world, from sub-urban Bangkok to the Amazon and Arctic Canada, we will develop site-specific off-grid integrated heat/water technologies. We will develop low-cost sensors, real-time monitoring and adaptive control for remote distributed water infrastructure. With water technology companies, we will analyse how suites of technologies can be configured and controlled to shape new models for decentralised provision. Scottish Water will invest significantly in co-creating rural demonstrators and a mobile technology-demonstration platform for sustainable communities and with Northumbrian, Welsh Water and other utilities and stakeholders we will build momentum for a radically new low-carbon decentralised future for the water industry. Working with stakeholders, from communities to legislators, we seek to incentivise community-led infrastructure solutions and to modify regulation in ways that balance local stakeholder needs and global goals for decarbonising infrastructure. Working with professional bodies and innovation centres we will create a global centre of excellence in off-grid water provision, with the drive and passion to deliver transformational change; helping to deliver 2050 net-zero carbon and Sustainable Development Goal 6.
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