Page 561 - Industrial Wastewater Treatment, Recycling and Reuse

Industrial Wastewater Treatment, Recycling, and Reuse—Past, Present and Future 531

Bio-energy

Recovered chemicals

Recovered metals

Wastewater stream Bio materials
Water

Fertilizers

Wastewater treatment Other uses

Figure 14.3 Wastewater as a resource.

regulations. Yet, generating energy from wastewaters, which is not new to
present day operations, provides an arena for developing profit-making
schemes related to industrial wastewater treatment. New generation tech-
nologies such as microbial fuel cells can be developed in the future to extract
electricity from wastewaters. Apart from effectively treating the effluent,
these developments can transform “energy consuming wastewater treatment
processes” to “energy producing wastewater treatment processes.” This
option has the potential to overtake conventional anaerobic processes that
produce methane for energy. In the future such options will receive
increased attention worldwide, as communities attempt to modify or even
replace existing biological treatment methodologies and to develop a more
“energy-environment sustainable” platform for industrial wastewater treat-
ment, recycling, and reuse.
Wastewater treatment can also generate added value through the recov-
ery of important materials and chemicals, or even the water itself in water
stressed regions. However, significant efforts are still required to improve
the process efficiencies and to develop newer separation options for recovery
and reuse. For example, newer separation technologies can be developed
for recovering phosphorus, phosphates, acids, metals, and other substances
from wastewaters. “Smart” or “intelligent” materials will one day have
the capacity to identify and target valuable or toxic pollutants, recovering,