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Group of Environmental Engineering and Microbiology

The Group of Environmental Engineering and Microbiology (GEMMA) is located at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (DECA)) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. BarcelonaTech (UPC).

The Group is dedicated to interdisciplinary research, innovation, knowledge transfer and education in environmental engineering; particularly in the fields of environmental biotechnologty, water supply, wastewater and solid waste treatment, and bioenergy generation. GEMMA was founded in 2005, since then the group has played a remarkable role promoting ecoinnovation and biotechnologies for efficient wastewater and sludge treatment and reuse.

GEMMA aims at contributing to sustainable development by means of fundamental and applied research activities, and through innovation in the water and energy fields.

The goal of our research activities is to develop and promote sustainable and innovative water, wastewater and sludge treatment biotechnologies, capable of removing a wide range of contaminants, including emerging pollutants.

The main research topics are:

Natural low-cost bioprocesses for wastewater and sludge treatment
Algal based technologies for wastewater treatment and biomass production
Bioenergy from waste and wastewater
Biogas production from solid waste and biomass
Water reuse and efficiency
Microbial fuel cells
Phosphorous removal and recovery from wastewater
Life Cycle Assessment and economic evaluation of products and technologies
Numerical simulation of bioprocesses

During the last 5 years, our research has covered a wide range of aspects including: the influence of design parameters on the removal of pollutants from wastewater and sludge, pollutants degradation pathways, micropollutants and emerging pollutants removal in natural wastewater treatment systems, the role of microfauna in decontamination processes, biogas production in low-cost anaerobic digesters, greenhouse gases emissions from wastewater and sludge treatment facilities, economic and environmental assessment of biotechnologies, bioprocess modeling.