The food and drink industry is the EU's biggest manufacturing. However, this industry is one of the most water and energy intensive industries worldwide while the companies belong to that sector produce a lot of waste. Specifically, the food and beverage industry consumes 56% of the available water for industrial and urban use. Additionally, food processing embeds 28% of the total energy used for production, while the total direct energy consumed by the European food industry amounted to 28.4 Mt oil equivalent, while 30.6 Mt of food waste are produced in this industry. Although, huge steps have been made in increasing the water use efficiency through the use of modern technologies and methods, there is limited effort from the food and beverages industry to minimize freshwater use during the raw material processing. In addition, high water consumption in industrial areas lead to increased production costs due to the fact that the tariffs for public wastewater treatment can be very high in European cities as well as the industrial electricity prices can also be very high. Currently, solutions for wastewater treatment in industries include the use of clarification, membrane filtration, reverse osmosis, process water polishing, disinfection with water treatment chemicals and UV, and biological treatment technologies. However, the use of these technologies under a water-waste-energy nexus is very limited. AccelWater’s project main objective is to optimize freshwater water consumption in the food and beverage industry under a water-waste-energy nexus by introducing beyond state-of-the-art water reclaiming, reusing and Artificial Intelligence enabled monitoring and control technologies will permit the use of reclaimed water in the manufacturing processes of food and beverages and on the same time will allow waste and energy reclamation, optimization and management, and consequently will result to environmental and socioeconomic sustainability.

The objective of aWISH is to develop and offer a cost-efficient solution to evaluate and improve the welfare of meat-producing livestock at a large scale, across Europe. This approach will be developed and evaluated in close collaboration with all actors involved, from primary producers up to policy makers and citizens. At the heart of the aWISH solution is the automated monitoring at the slaughterhouse of complementary animal-based indicators for monitoring welfare on-farm, during (un)loading, transport and slaughter. Besides that, existing or routinely collected data (slaughterhouse data, antibiotics usage, farm data, etc.) and needed technologies on-farm or on-transport to complement the measurements at slaughter will be exploited. Piloting and development activities will be done in 6 broiler chicken and fattening pig production chains across Europe (FR, PL, ES, NL, AT, RS), using a lean multi-actor approach, in order to test and validate the project results. Novel sensor technologies and AI algorithms will be developed, and a feedback tool and interface will allow each actor in the chain to get direct feedback of each batch, visualize trends and benchmark animal welfare outcomes. An Animal Welfare Indicator Catalogue will disseminate all validated indicators and standardized data collection methods. From the pilot data, animal welfare initiatives taken at operator, chain, regional or national level will be assessed alongside their environmental and socio-economic impact at operator and sector level. Next to that, 9 Best Practice Guides will be developed to improve key welfare issues in pigs and broilers, and to help external actors deploy the aWISH technologies and feedback tool. How the feedback loop guides and motivates each party to take actions to improve animal welfare will be tested in a longitudinal study, and the needs, perceptions and barriers of all actors from farm to fork incl. the consumer will be researched to maximize impact of the aWISH results.