Projects

Every project below exists because we don’t accept that residue is just the price of doing business.

Clera d.o.o. works where water problems actually occur — on site, in the plant, at the discharge point. Our work runs in two tracks: EU-funded projects, where we build and prove technology together with research and industry partners, and industrial projects, where we solve a specific customer problem.

EU projects

REMEDIES — trapping microplastics at the source

Horizon Europe · Grant Agreement No. 101093964 · HORIZON-MISS-2021-OCEAN-03 · 2022–2026

REMEDIES works towards a plastic-litter-free Mediterranean, from monitoring to removal. Clera is a consortium partner contributing to WP1 (drone-based detection of microplastic litter) and WP2 (microplastic trapping demonstrators), and is lead contractor for Deliverable D2.1, Microplastic litter trapping demonstrators.

Our system in this project — internally Innovation C3 — couples a silicon carbide ultrafiltration membrane with in-line ozonation. No dosing chemistry, no consumable additives.

Marina Izola, Slovenia — boat-washing greywater. The system is commissioned at the discharge point for vessel-washing wastewater. The incoming water proved far dirtier than expected and highly variable — heavy microplastic loads, oil residues and heavy metals, with chloride and sulfate levels swinging by an order of magnitude between sampling campaigns.

Confirmed result: up to 95% microplastic removal efficiency, meeting the demonstrator’s project target. Source: REMEDIES D2.1, Microplastic litter trapping demonstrators (2025).

One honest finding is worth stating plainly: the original plan was to recycle the treated water back into marina operations. That is not currently possible in Slovenia — EU Regulation 2020/741 on water reuse covers agriculture and has not been transposed into national law, so there is no legal basis for reusing marina wastewater. The system was therefore re-targeted at treating the water to full compliance for discharge into the public sewer, with reuse remaining open once a legal framework exists. The technology was never the constraint; the regulation was.

Industrial laundry, Fiume Veneto (PN), Italy. A laundry line generates synthetic fibres plus softeners and additives that attack membranes, so the process was redesigned around a multi-stage train ending in reverse osmosis, aimed at recovering water for reuse in the wash cycle.

Replication. The laundry unit is being transferred to the Wasser 3.0 facility in Landau, Germany, as the project’s replication site.

See it running: REMEDIES Koper demo site video — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3s3ZXTJcWw

Partners we work with here: Wasser 3.0 (Germany), National Institute of Chemistry (Slovenia), University of Maribor, CNR (Italy), NTUA (Greece), AITIIP (Spain), Infordata Sistemi (Italy).

INSPIRE — Innovative Solutions for Plastic Free European Rivers

Horizon Europe · Grant Agreement No. 101112879 · HORIZON-MISS-2022-OCEAN-01-04 · 48 months, to May 2027 · coordinated by VLIZ (Belgium)

INSPIRE targets plastic pollution in European rivers — the pathway by which most marine plastic actually arrives. Clera contributes its membrane filtration system to the Slovenian use case at Domžale, in the work package covering prevention, retention, collection and elimination, and also takes part in the project’s dissemination and management activities.

A river-connected wastewater treatment plant is a different problem from a marina: continuous flow, different particle profile, different operating constraints. Running the same filtration platform there is what lets us size a system for a new site with confidence rather than optimism.

WABIN — cross-border water balance of hydrogeological basins

Interreg VI-A Italy–Slovenia 2021–2027 · Clera as project partner PP4

Groundwater does not stop at a state border. WABIN builds a 3D hydrogeological model of the Soča/Isonzo basin and turns it into something usable: a cross-border protocol for protecting, monitoring and sustainably managing shared water resources, together with the municipalities, civil protection units and utilities that actually run those systems.

Clera leads the stakeholder side of that work on the Slovenian coast — the focus group in Nova Gorica, the drafting of the cross-border consensus document, and the study visit — and carries the project into public settings through Street Science Trieste, the Water Festival in Mirano, and a young communicators’ competition for schools.

Co-financed by the European Union under Interreg VI-A Italy-Slovenia. Total budget: €902,129.43 — ERDF contribution: €724,525.00 — Clera.One’s share: €97,402.40. Project page: www.ita-slo.eu/wabin

AQUAMARINA — smart water management for ports and marinas

Interreg Italy–Slovenia · proof of concept · with Infordata Sistemi Srl (Trieste)

Ports, marinas and shipyards produce discharge streams that change by the hour and are almost never monitored in real time. AQUAMARINA builds an IoT and AI platform for continuous water quality monitoring in maritime infrastructure, with predictive anomaly detection and recovery of metals from wastewater for circular reuse.

Clera is the technical and content lead: we define the problem, design the solution, write the protocols and specifications, and drive the business case. Infordata Sistemi delivers the platform, the hardware and the operational roll-out. The same monitoring logic transfers directly to industrial sites with complex discharge streams.

In development

On-site hydrogen peroxide — hygiene without the chlorine

Development programme · gas diffusion electrode (GDE) microreactor · currently TRL 5

Every litre of disinfectant used on a farm, in a packing house or in a food plant is bought somewhere else, driven across Europe, and stored on site under hazard rules. Then it leaves a residue on the product. Chlorinated wash water is the clearest case: it deposits chlorate on edible crops, and the residue limits are tightening.

We make the disinfectant where it is used instead. Our GDE microreactor produces hydrogen peroxide from water, air and electricity — nothing to transport, nothing to store, no halogenated residue. The peroxide does its work and decomposes back into water and oxygen. Every dosing cycle is logged, which turns hygiene into something a grower can put in front of a retailer or an auditor rather than something recorded by hand.

The technology runs under an exclusive licence covering electrochemical on-site generation of hydrogen peroxide, including the biocidal-products regulatory pathway (BPR Article 95). In water treatment, that regulatory position is the real barrier to entry, and it is the reason this route is open to us and closed to most.

The architecture is a patent-pending tri-layer microchannel gas diffusion electrode, engineered to hold roughly 1 wt % output — the concentration industrial clean-in-place duty actually needs — delivered on site and on demand, at a lower energy cost than buying, shipping and storing the equivalent chemical. It is validated in a relevant environment today, and the current programme is taking it onto real production lines.

Where it applies: post-harvest washing lines · irrigation and nutrient loops · greenhouses and hydroponics · agri-food process water · clean-in-place systems.

Public-sector projects

HEMRIS — real-time heavy metal monitoring in the sea

iMermaid cascade funding (Horizon) · for the Municipality of Ankaran, Slovenia · completed April 2026

The Municipality of Ankaran won funding from the second open call of the iMermaid cascade mechanism and brought us in for the technical work: detecting and measuring heavy metals in seawater, and testing whether they can be taken back out.

We ran it in three phases over eighteen months. First the groundwork — technical specifications, sampling points and methods, monitoring parameters, and the calibration and validation protocols for the iMERMAID sensors, alongside a survey of the existing filtration in the marina. Then implementation: sensors installed and configured in the field, water sampled at the identified locations, and every sensor reading checked against a parallel laboratory analysis, because a sensor you have not cross-validated is an opinion, not a measurement. We also assessed the existing sand-and-carbon filtration, tested compatibility with 4DS technology, and looked at selective removal and recovery of metals with the focus on copper.

The closing phase was the honest part: statistical analysis of field and laboratory results for copper, lead, zinc and cadmium, an assessment of how the sensors actually held up in real marine conditions, and a final report with recommendations on implementation, optimisation and whether the technology is fit for wider use in marine environments. Delivered on contract date, 15 April 2026.

This is the shape of work we like: a public authority with a real environmental obligation, a technology that has to prove itself in salt water rather than in a brochure, and a written answer at the end that the client can act on.

Inkubator+ Hrpelje-Kozina — strategy for a municipal business incubator

For the Municipality of Hrpelje-Kozina, Slovenia · 2024

The municipality had a building and an ambition, but not yet an answer to the harder question: what would a business incubator in Kozina actually do, for whom, and on what money.

So we asked. Around ten interviews with local entrepreneurs, and interviews across the Slovenian and Italian support ecosystem — established incubators and technology parks on both sides of the border — to learn what works, what quietly does not, and where a small municipality can realistically compete. Alongside that, an analysis of the local economy and its addressable value, a SWOT, and a target-group analysis covering traditional and family firms, workers who might become founders, young people, and cross-border partners.

We delivered a one-year operating plan with its cost side, a three-year strategy and business model with a financial structure and milestones, a proposal for the incubator’s legal form, a KPI framework tied to the municipality’s own indicators, and a final report and presentation to stakeholders at the end of 2024.

The most valuable part of that report was the uncomfortable part: the local economy on its own cannot carry an incubator over the long run, so the model has to be built around drawing firms into the region and around genuine cross-border positioning. We would rather say that at the start than let a client discover it in year three.

Industrial projects

Glycol-loaded process water — paints and resins

Highly loaded glycol wastewater is difficult to treat biologically. We are running a treatment project based on advanced oxidation, combining hydrogen peroxide with targeted ultrasound, on a real industrial effluent. Testing is ongoing. Customer name withheld pending consent.

Cleaning-in-place for beverage dispensing

Narrow, long dispensing lines with multiple bends cannot be cleaned reliably by conventional means. We assessed the process on site and proposed a treatment route based on hydrogen peroxide generated at the point of use, combined with nanobubbles, designed to take hazardous cleaning chemistry out of the service technician’s hands. Customer name withheld pending consent.

Work with us

We are looking for demonstration sites and industrial partners with a concrete water or hygiene problem. If a chemical you buy, transport and store is costing you money, risk or a compliance headache, that is exactly the case we want to see.

Clera d.o.o. · Ferrarska ulica 30, 6000 Koper, Slovenia · info@clera.one