Atlantis Case Study

Every year, ISRI helps hundreds of companies across Europe and beyond to harness the potential of science and technology to create new and valuable products and processes.

This is exactly what happened with the Atlantis project, where a Ballast Water Treatment (BWT) system was designed to efficiently target and incapacitate a full spectrum of marine organisms <50μm. The introduction of invasive marine species into new environments from the discharge of ship ballast water has been identified as the 4th largest threat to the world’s oceans.

The UN’s International Maritime Organisation has adopted a convention for a mandatory BWT system on both new and existing ships by 2016.

Unlike other forms of marine pollution, such as oil spills, where remedial action can be taken that the environment will eventually recover from, the impacts of invasive marine species are often irreversible. In addition, with 80% of the world’s commodities transported by sea, there is an environmental and commercial need to develop an effective solution to the dispersal of untreated ballast water.

In the proposed Atlantis project, ISRI’s chemical and biotech departments intend to research and develop a BWT system using multi-biocidal delivery technology. They propose to develop a high surface-area substrate with multi-functional surface properties, enabling multiple biocides to be incorporated.