09-09-2025
Diogo Borges de Sousa,PhD student in Environment and Sustainability at NOVA FCT and researcher at MARE – Marine and Environmental Sciences Centre and at the Associate Laboratory for Green Chemistry (LAQV-REQUIMTE), won the award for best oral presentation at the 5th International Conference On Water, Energy, Food and Sustainability (ICOWEFS 2025).
His talk stood out for its practical relevance and for the clarity with which it communicated results that combine sustainability and innovation in water treatment. The presented work addresses the occurrence of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs in aquatic environments — in particular diclofenac — and tests a low-cost solution for their removal: the use of drinking water treatment sludges (DWTS). The results show that this sludge performs comparably to other adsorbents studied, demonstrating its potential as an economical and effective material to mitigate emerging contaminants in water.
The award recognises not only the scientific rigour of the study but also its applied dimension: turning a waste (sludge) into a useful resource aligns with the principles of the circular economy and could reduce costs and environmental impacts in water treatment operations. As a next step, the researcher will test the effectiveness of DWTS under continuous-flow conditions, using a filter composed of this sludge to simulate scenarios closer to real applications in wastewater treatment plants.
