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Publiée le 12/06/13 à 20h03

In september 2008, a European initiative called Slasorb was launched, to treat wastewater through an original process : the removal of phosphates using a by-product of the steel industry called 'slag'.

In 2008, Florent Chazarenc set up a group to address the issue in Europe. He built a consortium which included Arcelor-Mittal, the world's number one steel company, and a number of SME's such as Akut, a company which works in wastewater treatment, and Epur Nature, specialised in reed bed filters, as well as three laboratories : the Ecole des Mines-Armines, coordinaters of the project, and two German laboratories, FeHS and ArGe-HK. The Slasorb project (which comes from 'using SLAg as SORBent to remove phosphorus from wastewater'), had a budget of a little over a million euros. The project was launched in July 2009, for an initial period of 36 months - extended for a further six months.

"The removal of phosphorus from waste water has become a major issue a result of increasingly strict regulations in Europe, according to Florent Chazarenc. We are ahead of new regulations. Slasorb provides a method which is effective and inexpensive, and uses a an indusrial by-product : slag. The end product is a phosphate residue, which can then be used as fertilizer in agriculture."
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