Heliospectra, a Swedish LED producer with main focus on plant grow lights, has announced on its website the introduction of a new wastewater treatment technology.
In an ongoing project in Lund, southern Sweden, the company aims at changing the view of wastewater with new, innovative solutions. As Heliospectra explained, these solutions are resource-efficient and facilitate utilizing substances in the wastewater for generating saleable products while at the same time closing the water and nutrient loops. An important part of the waste disposal process is about using the amazing capabilities of microalgae.

 
With Heliospectra’s intelligent controllable LED lighting solutions growers and researchers are now able to test different light recipes for optimized microalgae growth. As Heliospectra pointed out, with optimum light, microalgae can thrive, grow, and in massive proportions eat much of the not so active content in wastewater - a context in were most ordinary plants or macroalgae would have died.
 
The lights are submersed in a glass tube and do their job inside a custom made wastewater treatment photobioreactor. Once a week the nutrient reduction in the wastewater is measured as well as the amount of algae after harvest. The LED lights are controllable and raise possibilities to keep the light as a controlled factor in the photobioreactor. The result is a rapid growth of microalgae which can be refined and become a resource of biofuel or gas.
As Heliospectra furthermore pointed out, transforming wastewater into an algae stew has many advantages. The wastewater can once again be transferred back into the society’s system, tightening the loop of recycling, and help decreasing nutrients leak to the natural environment, causing overfeeding of our oceans and lakes with the result of algae blooms and stinking beaches.sm.