Ilgaz is researching a new toolkit to help maximise performance of reed bed wastewater treatment systems in Scottish whisky distilleries.

My PhD focusses on sustainable and high-performance green wastewater treatment technologies in the whisky sector of Scotland. As the need for (WWT) is increasing, wetland systems are a possible pathway to treat metal-contaminated water, with reed beds a proven system for distillery effluent, using natural ecological filters. While this is considered sustainable, a reed-bed function can be highly ‘variable’, working well in some situations but poorly elsewhere. The causes of this variability are poorly understood and measuring water quality (alone) cannot identify why a reed bed succeeds/fails. To understand this, deeper insights are needed, as these are complex systems wherein bacteria, algae, plants, etc., all act together to remove pollution. A new tool now exists that can be used to explore this, ‘metagenomic barcoding’ – which comprehensively assesses broad differences in biotic communities – allowing new links to be made between water quality, environment, community structure, and reed-bed ‘function’. This new knowledge can then allow new reed-bed solutions to be designed.