Arriva Italia: €1.44m EU funding for LIFEH2OBUS project, aimed at reducing water waste in the transport sector 

Arriva Italia – the Italian holding company of the Arriva Group and one of the leading operators in the local public transport sector in Italy – together with Arriva Hungary, Pluservice – a software house active in integrated information systems (ERP) in the mobility sector – and La Sapienza University of Rome, has been awarded a €1.44 million grant through the EU’s LIFE program for an innovative project that aims to enable transport operators across Europe to significantly reduce the consumption of water used for cleaning vehicles (Project No. 101074151).

LIFEH2OBUS will for the first time define a European best practice on water management for bus transport operators to save as much water as possible. During the three-year project, information and data will be collected through the use of innovative software that will help define the most effective best practices, making them flexible enough to adapt to different economic, geographic and climatic contexts.

The goal is that the best practices defined through this project will then be shared and adopted as widely as possible by European bus operators.

“This is the first time that the European Union is funding a project focused on reducing water consumption and waste in the local public transport sector, and as Arriva Italia we are of course honored to be part of it,” points out Angelo Costa, managing director of Arriva Italia. – We expect the LIFEH2OBUS project to help bring the transport sector closer to the European goals of sustainability and circularity, while providing bus operators with guidelines to successfully implement the most impactful solutions and publicly highlighting the importance of water conservation as part of the sustainability agenda.”

The goal of LIFEH2OBUS is to test three different state-of-the-art solutions: wastewater recovery and reuse, wastewater recovery in combination with a rainwater harvesting system, and the use of a new exterior waxing technique that eliminates the need to use water to clean vehicles.

The three solutions will be compared at Arriva depots in three different European locations: in Grugliasco (TO) in Italy and in Budapest, Hungary. During the project, parameters will be collected and monitored through the innovative “Intelligent Garage Management System” software, which will be customized and implemented by Pluservice. The operational, environmental, climatic and economic data will then be analyzed and evaluated by La Sapienza University in order to develop a final matrix between adoptable locations and techniques.

Finally, LIFEH2OBUS will provide all local public road transport operators with a dashboard that will allow them to identify and implement the most efficient water management solution, while also demonstrating that switching from preventive to predictive maintenance can make a key contribution in reducing water consumption, as well as better managing available resources and saving time.