A healthy environment is essential for maintaining long-term prosperity and quality of life. We all think we have the right to demand that neither the air that we breathe, nor the water that we drink or the food that we eat contain noxious pollutants. We wish to avoid the threat and the uncertainty caused by the climate change. A clean and healthy environment is vital for obtaining the quality of life that we want for ourselves and for our children. However, future growth and the ever increasing level of prosperity will put pressure on the planet’s capacity to sustain the demand for resources and to absorb pollution. At the same time, high environmental standards are an engine for innovation and business opportunities. Overall, society must work to de-couple environmental impacts and degradation on the one hand, and economical growth, on the other hand. Companies need to increase their ecological performance, in other words, to produce an equal or bigger amount of products using less resources and generating less waste, and consumer models need to become more sustainable.
 
The ECOCERÁMICA Project aims at reducing the environmental impact of sludge from wastewater treatment plants (EDAR), by means of suitable management and recycling techniques, in accordance with the National Plan for Sludge from Wastewater Treatment Plants. In most cases, this sludge is disposed of in landfills where it causes groundwater contamination by lixiviation and atmospheric contamination by greenhouse gas emissions. In other cases, it is used in agriculture as fertilizer. However, due to its high heavy metal content this use is inadvisable for health and environmental reasons.
 
ECOCERÁMICA contributes in a modest way to achieve the objectives stipulated in the VI Environmental Programme of the European Union. Our long-term well-being, in Europe and the rest of the world, depends on whether we are able to create a 'sustainable development', in other words, whether we can find ways to improve our quality of life without harming the environment, future generations and the people of both the rich and the developing world.