The Institute for Water Quality and Waste Management (IWA) was established in 1964. It is part of the Department of Civil Engineering at the Vienna University of Technology. The 37 staff members are working in four fields (water quality; chemistry and biology of water; wastes and materials management, resource management), each guided by a full professor (Brunner, Kroiss, Matsche, Rechberger). The main tasks of TU-Vienna are research and teaching in the above fields. The chief expertise includes waste water engineering, water quality management in large water sheds, waste and resource management, thermal waste treatment, and sustainable regional materials management.

IWA has close co-operations in research and teaching with several universities in Europe (Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, and Eastern Europe), and overseas (USA, Australia). IWA faculty members supervise PhD students at renown domestic and foreign Universities.

They are on advisory boards of leading research institutions and of important governmental bodies such as heading the advisory board of the Austrian Minister of the Environment. TU-Vienna is particularly well represented in steering committees of domestic and international associations dealing with water and wastes management.
The pioneering work on materials balances for waste management was started by P. H. Brunner in 1982, and culminated in the development of a method to indirectly determine waste composition by analysing single waste treatment outputs in 1998. This work was published in the most prominent research journal of the field.

IWA at Vienna University of Technology will give main contribution in WP5 being the responsible WP-leader.