Page 220 - Industrial Wastewater Treatment, Recycling and Reuse

194 Industrial Wastewater Treatment, Recycling, and Reuse

• High volume of wastewater.
– The volume of wastewater is one of the principal criteria for the
design of effective treatment plants. Most conventional treatment
processes are designed for specific flow rates and are not flexible to
meet the changing needs of industry.
An industry has to make a highly predictive guess on its rate of expansion and
design a treatment plant to cater to the needs for the next decade, which is
a waste of critical industrial resources.
• Very scarce space available for in-plant treatment.
– Space for treatment is another major bottleneck. Our experience
with industries has indicated that the nonavailability of effective
treatment areas becomes a hurdle in implementing a treatment
process.
– Today it is felt that 95 industries out of 100 have severe space lim-
itations for expansion of wastewater treatment plants. There is an
urgent need for a technology/process that can deliver treatment
results with an ultra low footprint.
• Complex and unpredictable nature of wastewater with dyes, auxiliaries, and
biorefractory compounds.
– The days of one company–one product are long gone. Today even
a small and a medium scale enterprise (SME) chemical industry is
forced to produce a large variety of products if it is to stay competitive.
– Unfortunately, treatment technologies designed decades ago were
for a uniform wastewater stream with minimal variations in its
composition.
– Today’s industries, such as chemicals and pharmaceuticals, produce
such a wide variety of products that no single technology can meet
their treatment requirements.
In a nutshell, it can be said that developments in treatment technology have
failed to keep pace with the developments in process and synthesis
technology.
• Biological treatment is unable to handle organic and hydraulic loads.
• Larger treatment plants based on biological systems are not viable from engineer-
ing and economic point of views.
– As mentioned earlier, space is a very critical commodity today.
An industry would choose production capacity expansion over treat-
ment capacity.
• Skilled manpower is not readily available to handle conventional plants.