Drinking water quality in real-time by 2025

Major investment in drinking water quality will provide new knowledge and faster analysis. "In the future, we will know about a quality change before it occurs."

In 2025, we will have a system for measuring drinking water quality in real time, from source to tap. This is the common goal when Sweden Water Research takes lead in the question of drinking water quality development.

Sandy Chan, process engineer at Sydvatten, and Josefin Barup, research engineer at VA SYD/Sweden Water Research are the driving forces behind the ambitious work.

– Drinking water quality has been measured in much the same way for 100 years, so now we have four years to change it! Today it takes several days to get an answer to a test, which means that we are always behind. Our vision is to be faster than the bacteria, in 2025 we will know about a change in quality before it occurs, says Josefin Barup.

– Our three owners, NSVA, Sydvatten and VA SYD, all work with the same challenges and the same goals. We now have a common mandate to pursue the issue of drinking water quality in all three organizations. The strength is that we can collect everything that is done in the area, connect it with ongoing research and work with drinking water quality from source to customer, says Sandy Chan.

The initiative is both about finding and implementing new technology for measuring and analyzing, and getting the supervisory authorities to approve these.

– This investment is unique in Sweden. There are many initiatives and a lot of expertise in the water sector in Sweden and internationally, but we have not seen such clear cooperation across organizational boundaries in Sweden before. It is necessary for someone to take a holistic approach and now we do it. We will gather, concretize and show the way forward, says Henrik Aspegren, CEO of Sweden Water Research.