XI'AN- The Dutch industrial water company Evides and three leading research institutes – the Technical University of Delft (The Netherlands), the National Engineering Center of Urban Water Resources of Harbin Institute of Technology (Heilongjiang province) and the Provincial Academy of Environmental Science at Xi'an (Shaanxi province) – signed a cooperation agreement on November 25, 2011, which represents the start of the Sino-Dutch Research Program (SDRP). The SDRP is funded by Evides and has an initial term of five years.

It combines fundamental and applied research and focuses on the development of new and improved advanced waste water treatment technologies, reuse technologies and zero liquid technologies. Evides aims at using its know-how to optimize operations at its existing chemical waste water treatment plants in the Netherlands. Additionally, Evides intends to design greenfield water treatment plants for the coal-based chemical industry in China and Europe. The goal is to create process designs that contribute to substantially higher sustainability standards while achieving improved reliability at competitive costs. This is especially valuable for the chemical industry in the northern provinces of Shaanxi, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia autonomous region and Ningxia Hui autonomous region, where tough chemical challenges and water shortages demand new approaches to safeguard the availability of water while limiting the water footprint of the chemical industry on the environment.

Both HIT and PAES have a reputation for specific research and have expertise within the fields of environmental engineering and process integration in the industry. The TUD is famous for its involvement in the development of numerous advanced (waste) water treatment technologies and already is a long-standing partner of Evides, which itself is one of the largest industrial water companies in Europe. It operates water treatment plants in the chemical industry that have been designed, financed, constructed and operated by its own staff under so-called BOT (Build Operate Transfer) contracts.

The signing ceremony was held in Xi'an, thereby proving the importance of this province and its coal-based chemical industry as a generator for market driven research. With the Ambassador of the Netherlands to China Mr Van Ee as honorary guest, the contracts were signed by Peter Vermaat (CEO of Evides NV), Markus Flick (director of Evides Industriewater), Prof. Shi Guangji (director of HIT) and Dr. Zhang (director of PAES).