book chapter · IntechOpen eBooks
This chapter addresses the significant challenges in sustainable wastewater treatment, including managing increasing wastewater volumes, meeting evolving effluent quality standards, generating energy from treatment processes, and deploying compact systems. It discusses historical advancements in biological wastewater treatment technologies, highlighting the reasons behind these improvements. Key drivers for technological progress include reducing capital and operational costs, increasing plant volumetric capacity, enhancing effluent quality, improving nutrient removal, mitigating biofouling and membrane clogging, and optimising installation size. The chapter also covers biochemical oxygen demand as a water quality measure, the role of genetically engineered microorganisms, bioremediation, and the process of scaling up treatment plants from pilot to full-scale.
Effective wastewater treatment is crucial for protecting the environment and public health from pollution caused by domestic and industrial discharges. This research highlights ongoing efforts to innovate and improve treatment processes, which can lead to more efficient, cost-effective, and environmentally sound solutions for managing global water resources.
This work explores advancements in biological wastewater treatment, which could lead to more efficient and compact treatment systems for municipalities and industries. Technology developers and wastewater treatment plant operators could utilise these insights to improve existing processes or develop new solutions, potentially incorporating genetically engineered microorganisms. The discussion of pilot-scale to full-scale upgrades suggests an applied research focus, aiming for practical implementation of improved technologies.
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Preventing environmental pollution by adequately treating the ever-increasing volume of wastewater generated by the over 8.1 billion (UN 2024 projection) people in the world, meeting governments’ often updated effluent quality standards as a result of emerging contaminants in domestic and industrial wastewater, operating wastewater treatment process to generate energy through methane production and capture to save operating costs, and deploying a compact system to fit reducing installation space are some of the daring challenges facing sustainable wastewater treatment technologies today. Hence, there is a need for continued innovation and development of treatment processes. The current chapter discussed advancements in biological wastewater treatment technologies through the years with a focus on reasons for improvements in technologies. Some of the reasons highlighted are capital and operational costs, plant volumetric capacity, effluent quality, efficient nutrient removal, biofouling and membrane clogging, treatment plant installation size, etc. The chapter also discussed biochemical oxygen demand as a measure of water quality for biological treatment systems, the role of genetically engineered microorganisms in biological wastewater treatment, bioremediation as a biological treatment process, treatment plant pilot-scale, and upgrade to full-scale.
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DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.1004638
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