The GROHE Water Prize awards visionary projects that are pushing the boundaries of design within the built environment and water. GROHE will award £10,000 to the winning project to help enhance the scheme.

This prize is supported by: 

About the prize

We are delighted that WAF’s founder partner, GROHE, will once again supported the Water Prize. GROHE is supporting research into tackling unique challenges that water presents, with the winning initiative awarded £10,000 of funding. The results of this work were presented at WAF 2025 on the Festival Hall Stage and the overall winner received their trophy at the Gala Dinner.

The GROHE Water Prize 2025 will reward first-class thought leadership, innovation and research initiatives. The programme supplied funding which contributed towards work in universities or other research institutions investigating aspects of these subjects.

2024 Winner

The Maotai Eco-Metaverse project, by Turenscape, was the unanimous choice of the judges as the winner of the GROHE Water Prize 2024.

The research & development project is being built on 8 hectares in Maotai Town, Guizhou Province, for a liquor distillery to manage a daily output of 7,000 tons of sewage and industrial wastewater, by creating an ecosystem that fully integrates water, nutrient, carbon, and energy recycling.

The project addresses the immediate environmental impacts of distillery operations in several ways:

- It enables the enhancement of the project’s innovative water recycling and the sustainable ecosyste

- It installs advanced real-time sensing technology to facilitate the creation of a detailed regression model that analyses the interplay between the nature-based Solutions (NbS) system's performance, and environmental variables like sunlight, temperature, and wind.

- The project makes a conscious effort to harmonise the company’s legacy and operations with modern environmental principles. Ensuring that economic growth does not come at the expense of the environment.

The judges noted this advanced technological and environmental proposal was welcome evidence of Chinese strong advancement and desire to be a leader in sustainable industrial practices. Although specific to a planned distillery, the principles involved would apply to any industrial facility using large amounts of water; the project is local, but can have global applications.

Not only does the project deal with the challenges of carbon, energy-efficiency, water cleansing and nutrient recycling through nature-based solutions, but it also creates an environment which would be attractive to visitors.

The monitoring of environmental and performance information, then used to tune the technological operation, make this a true research project, not simply the application of existing technology, and a worthy winner. It moves the needle.

2024 Shortlist