Clean water and sanitation, the outcomes of wastewater treatment, are the pillars of sustainable development and influences, to various extents, our health, work and education, among others. The Sustainable Development Goals and EU’s Water Framework Directive both recognize environmental technologies as means of implementing their targets.
It is well-known that current wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) designs, which generally uses conventional technologies, suffer from a large energy consumption, space requirements and sludge production. In the near future, it is also expected that pollutant loads will increase, especially in urban areas, combined with more stringent effluent quality limits. All these challenges need to be simultaneously addressed at once. However, there is a limit to how much operational and control strategies for conventional WWTPs can do to resolve these challenges. Over the past 20 years, some distinct technological innovations have been made in the field of wastewater treatment, demonstrating that a better effluent quality and sustainability can go hand in hand, and may even be combined with reduced investment and operating costs. The integration of these novel technologies within WWTP schemes already applied in practice as well as those put forward for the future, offers promising perspectives in addressing the above-mentioned current and future WWTP challenges.
The main scientific objective of the WISEFLOW project was to develop innovative wastewater treatment process layouts, comprised of conventional and novel unit processes. These new process layouts were evaluated by comparing their performance with respect to a conventional activated sludge-based WWTP. The comparison was performed using a set of evaluation criteria which takes into account effluent quality, operational costs, system compactness, energy-efficiency, resource recovery, among others.
