How can water have a second life? When does waste become a resource? How can microorganisms invisible to the naked eye help address major environmental challenges? Researchers’ Night gave these questions the opportunity to leave scientific publications and become the starting point for a conversation — accessible, engaging and open to everyone. Science is powerful when it creates value for society and the economy, both in the near and longer term.

Researchers from the Clean&Circle Centre of Competence joined this conversation through two complementary opportunities to meet them: a stand at UNITe and open doors at the modern laboratories in the Centre’s new building. Both shared the aim of showing how knowledge is created and how it can become a solution for a cleaner environment.

From a curious question to a scientific discovery

The UNITe stand offered a first encounter with Clean&Circle’s ideas — clean technologies, resource recovery and the circular economy. Behind these concepts are questions that concern everyone’s daily life: what happens to water after we use it; what remains after our waste; and how we can extract useful products and energy from materials we would usually discard. Numerous early-career and experienced Clean&Circle researchers from Sofia University and the Institute of Organic Chemistry with Centre of Phytochemistry took an active part in the stand.

Conversations with the researchers made it possible to follow the link between an environmental problem, a research idea and the path towards its application. They also revealed the human side of science — curiosity, doubt, patience and the satisfaction that comes when results begin to provide answers. Special attention was devoted to wastewater-treatment technologies at the Ravda WWTP and protecting the Black Sea for tourism; technologies for producing biogas and other valuable products — fertilisers and hydrogen — from waste; and water treatment using highly selective adsorbents obtained from waste. Mr Monas, Clean&Circle’s new mascot, also played a central role. It represents a bacterium from the Pseudomonas genus, known for actively degrading conventional and toxic pollutants in water and serving as a key indicator of wastewater-treatment effectiveness.

Open laboratories, open opportunities

In Clean&Circle’s new building, the encounter continued where ideas are tested through experiments. Opening the modern laboratories invited visitors to come closer to research work and understand what lies behind a measurement, an analysis or the development of a new technology.

Advanced equipment expands our capacity to observe and study processes that would otherwise remain hidden. Yet it is people who ask the questions, interpret the results and seek their meaning. That is why the most valuable part of the open doors is meeting the researchers — their experience, ideas and responsibility towards the future.

For young visitors, such a meeting can be the first step on their own scientific path. Sometimes an interest in biology, chemistry or technology begins with one unexpected question. Having the opportunity to ask it of someone who searches for answers professionally can turn curiosity into a direction for development.

Science with a mission we share

Clean&Circle’s participation in Researchers’ Night expresses the conviction that research infrastructure has public value when it creates knowledge, develops people and helps address real-world problems. Water treatment, waste recovery and bioenergy production link research to quality of life and care for natural resources.

When scientists explain their work and listen to visitors’ questions, trust is built. Science becomes easier to understand and the public conversation about the future more meaningful.

Researchers’ Night has ended, but its ideas continue to inspire long afterwards. Through its UNITe stand and open laboratories, Clean&Circle invited everyone with a curious mind to come closer to science, ask questions and discover.

Because the future needs knowledge — and people inspired to create it.

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