The European Union has made progress in dealing with municipal wastewater in individual countries and as a corporate entity. However, it intends to make still further and substantial progress over the next 15 years. Currently, the most widely available options in the EU are the agriculture utilization, the waste disposal sites, the land reclamation and restoration, the incineration and other novel uses. The selection of an option on a local basis reflects local or national, cultural, historical, geographical, legal, political and economic circumstances. The degree of flexibility varies from country to country. In any case sludge treatment and disposal should always be considered as an integral part of treatment of wastewater. There is a wide range of other uses for sludge, which exploit its energy or chemical content, namely the thermal processes. The present paper sought to review past and future trends in sludge handling, focusing mainly at thermal processes (e.g. pyrolysis, wet oxidation, gasification) and the utilization of sewage sludge in cement manufacture as a co-fuel.

Utilization of sewage sludge in EU application of old and new methods—A review

Production and harvesting of microalgae for wastewater treatment, biofuels, and bioproducts

Among various water purification and recycling technologies, adsorption is a fast, inexpensive and universal method. The development of low-cost adsorbents has led to the rapid growth of research interests in this field. The present protocol describes salient features of adsorption and details experimental methodologies for the development and characterization of low-cost adsorbents, water treatment and recycling using adsorption technology including batch processes and column operations. The protocol describes the development of inexpensive adsorbents from waste materials, which takes only 1-2 days, and an adsorption process taking 15-120 min for the removal of pollutants. The applications of batch and column processes are discussed, along with suggestions to make this technology more popular and applicable.

/pdf/advances-in-water-treatment-by-adsorption-technology-jevlg7pb9w.pdf

Advances in water treatment by adsorption technology

The sorption of three divalent metal ions — copper, nickel and lead — from aqueous solution onto peat in single component systems has been studied and the equilibrium isotherms determined. The experimental data have been analysed using the Langmuir, Freundlich, Redlich-Peterson, Toth, Temkin, Dubinin-Radushkevich and Sips isotherm models. In order to determine the best fit isotherm for each system, six error analysis methods were used to evaluate the data: the coefficient of determination, the sum of the errors squared, a hybrid error function, Marquardt's percent standard deviation, the average relative error and the sum of absolute errors. The error values demonstrated that the Sips equation provided the best model for the three sets of experimental data overall.

http://dns2.asia.edu.tw/~ysho/YSHO-English/Publications/PDF/Wat%20Air%20Soi%20Pol141,%201.pdf

M. E. M. Metcalf

Papers

Wastewater engineering treatment: disposal and reuse