Optimising conventional treatment of domestic waste water: quality, required surface area, solid waste minimisation and biogas production for medium and small-scale applications

Abstract

Municipal waste water, or sewage, is a combination of domestic and industrial effluent. The increasing volume of sewage due to urbanisation and economic growth places pressure on the treatment performance of existing waste treatment systems. Increasing volumes of industrial effluent disrupt the optimal functioning of biological waste water treatment facilities. This results in poor-quality treated waste water being discharged into the environment. A CSIR project, the integrated research infrastructure platform (IRIP), aims to demonstrate that the generation of electricity from renewable resources is not only economically feasible, but can serve as a catalyst to create sustainable jobs for the economic renewal of rural towns, improve service delivery and mitigate the negative effects of climate change on food and water security. IRIP aims to demonstrate the feasibility of this concept through the integration of different technologies. One of the major components of IRIP focuses on the recovery of energy from organic waste (sewage). The sewage treatment technology selected for IRIP includes a combination of improved biological treatment processes; membrane bioreactor technology (MBR) and an enhanced anaerobic digestion (AD) process