A SCIENTIFIC research facility which could transform the way the world deals with its sewage has been officially opened.

Europe’s first large-scale wastewater research unit using bacteria has opened in Birtley, near Chester-le-Street.

Newcastle University’s £1.7million Biological Engineering: Wastewater Innovation at Scale (BE:WISE) research facility will help scientists try to move from expensive high-energy treatments to new low-carbon alternatives with lower running costs.

Experts say there has been little change in the technologies used to manage the wastewater treatment process for decades, but the new unit means experiments can be run using 10,000 times more microbes than in the lab and the results used to develop new ways to treat wastewater.

First experiments - to identify the behaviour of thousands of species of bacteria - will get underway immediately, using wastewater from the Birtley sewage treatment plant, which serves 30,000 people.

Dr Russell Davenport, from Newcastle University, said: “If the water industry is to move to a low energy, low carbon alternative that meets ever-increasing environmental standards, in an affordable way, it has to innovate”.