News Portal

November 21, 2022Eawag researchers Wenzel Gruber and Urs Schönenberger have won this year's Otto Jaag Water Protection Prize for their dissertations. Reducing emissions of the climate-damaging nitrous oxide from wastewater treatment plants and reducing the leaching of pesticides from drainage systems are the topics.

November 17, 2022No tiger duck and no football club - the formula "yellow-black-grey" refers to the separation of wastewater streams at their source, i.e. at the toilet, washbasin or shower. This opens up new possibilities and saves resources. On the occasion of World Toilet Day on 19 November, a series of Eawag fact sheets shows how this can be done.

November 15, 2022Researchers at Eawag recommend setting up a monitoring system for antibiotic resistance in the synthesis report of the National Research Programme NRP 72 Antimicrobial resistance, similar to the wastewater monitoring for Sars-CoV-2.

November 15, 2022Professor Bernhard Truffer of the Eawag Water Research Institute is among the "highly cited researchers 2022".

November 7, 2022Terrestrial and aquatic food webs respond differently to changes in the environment. Understanding these differences is fundamental to identifying the species most important to an ecosystem and to effectively protecting biodiversity. This is shown by a study led by the research institutes Eawag and WSL and published in the journal Nature Communications.

October 27, 2022In the 45 years since he began studying Chemistry at ETH Zurich, Bernhard Wehrli has been a research scientist, Head of Department and member of the Directorate at Eawag and Professor at ETH Zurich, as well as holding various other positions. Though he has now retired, he remains committed to freshwater science and sustainability.

October 24, 2022Researchers at ETH Zurich and Eawag have developed an approach to accurately record and fully track the biodegradation of plastics in soils.  

October 18, 2022In many regions of the world, groundwater is contaminated with arsenic of natural origin. The harmful substance can be filtered out of water with the help of iron. Eawag researchers have for the first time made visible exactly what happens in this process in a new type of experimental set-up.

October 10, 2022Nature conservation pays off: amphibians benefit from new ponds - despite many causes of endangerment that still affect them. This is what researchers from WSL and Eawag found in a joint study using data from amphibian monitoring in the canton of Aargau. The study was published in the scientific journal PNAS.

October 7, 2022A high fraction of the endemic biodiversity of the Alps is very old. The endemics – species found only in a confined area – have developed over the past millions of years during the cycles of glacial and interglacial periods or even before these cycles began. Fish, however, are an exception: most endemic fish species emerged only after the end of the last ice age about 15,000 years ago.

October 4, 2022Thanks to an automatic image processing method that was developed by Eawag together with photrack AG and the ETH Zurich, mobile phone videos posted on the Internet can be used as an important source of data during a flood. Rescue forces can thus take highly targeted protection measures or warn the population at an early stage.

September 30, 2022The University of Lausanne has appointed Damien Bouffard as ad personam associate professor. The specialist in aquatic physics has headed the Eawag Aquatic Physics Research Group in the Surface Waters Department since January 2017.

September 29, 2022Natural waters are regularly polluted by the discharge of wastewater from combined sewage systems. With the help of a “digital twin”, the management of wastewater systems can be improved and water pollution decisively reduced.

September 27, 2022Janet Hering, Director of the aquatic research institute Eawag, signed a cooperation agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Monday 26 September 2022. The cooperation between Eawag and the IAEA should help to further advance groundwater research and support the sustainable utilisation of groundwater resources.

September 26, 2022Floating on Lake Geneva since 2019 is the globally unique research laboratory called LéXPLORE. Now anyone interested can visit the platform virtually, at any time and from anywhere, and learn more about the instruments, the data collected, the research projects and the goals of LéXPLORE.

September 23, 2022Insects that live entirely or partly in freshwater have a much lower proportion of invasive species than insects that live on land. This is shown in a study by the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL in collaboration with the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology Eawag and an international team of researchers.

September 22, 2022Professor Martin Ackermann, designated Director of Eawag and Professor at ETH Zurich, has been appointed Professor of Microbial Systems Ecology in the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering at EPFL.

September 22, 2022The smallest of all plastic particles have remained largely unexplored until now, because they could not be detected in the environment. Now researchers at Eawag show: Nanoplastics stick to slimy biofilms, which can for example be found on stones in streams or rivers. When freshwater snails feed on the slime, the nanoplastics are taken up.

September 20, 2022Around 140 participants from public administration, private engineering firms and research took advantage of the Eawag Info Day in Lausanne to learn about and exchange information on new possibilities for collecting and using water data.

September 16, 2022The “Water Wall” developed by Eawag researchers recycles handwashing and toilet flushing water in a closed cycle and can therefore be used in regions with scarce water resources or those without water and wastewater networks. Now the project has been awarded the Mülheim Water Award.

September 1, 2022For a long time professional fishermen have known that there is not just one whitefish species in Switzerland, but a whole range of species each with their own specialization and local name. Researchers have now analysed the entire genome of the various whitefish and shown how specialists have all developed independently of each other in each lake region.