Project Zero
Original title: Water Neutrality at NAV Sites
Competition: Breakthrough 1
Funding amount: £2,898,000
Led by: Affinity Water
Partners: Albion Water Limited, Aquality Trading & Consulting Ltd, BUUK Infrastructure UK No 2 Ltd, Grapviners Ltd, H2OiQ Ltd, Hydraloop International, Propelair – Phoenix Product Development Ltd, SDS Ltd, Skewb.
Project Completion date: June 2028
Water cycle tag: Customer and Communities
See project updates on the Project Zero website.
This project will deliver a sustainable, water-saving solution in response to new housing developments being built. Winning £2.9 million, this project will minimise water demand and offset water consumption with new technologies, to ensure the total water use in the community remains the same as it was before the new homes were built. We will manage the usage and offset requirements across three sites by installing water saving devices in residential properties – shower heads, tap inserts and larger infrastructure such as greywater recycling and rainwater harvesting units. This will minimise demand in customers’ homes. We will also install larger technologies on commercial buildings like schools and leisure centres – for example greywater recycling and ultra low flush toilets. This will offset customer usage and maintain existing baseline network demand. We will also be monitoring at a detailed level the patterns and trends of usage. This will allow us to adopt an open-data approach and share anonymised insights in water usage with the wider innovation market.
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Update from the project (October 2025)
Project Zero continues to make positive progress in our works on phase 3; exploring a hybrid solution for water neutrality. We have progressed our discussions and alignment of delivery programs with the developer. Project zero has recently completed a desktop-study report which aims to support understanding of the potential water resource benefits that rainwater harvesting fed non-potable systems could provide to new domestic development sites. We have begun to take valuable insights from this report and are working towards a publicly shareable document.