Abstract
Water scarcity increasingly drives wastewater recovery. Campaigns towards re-use of wastewater are not very common in Africa among other factors, due to a lack of efficient and cost-effective technology to treat wastewater to re-usable standards. In this study, two treatment systems, a high rate activated sludge (HRAS) system and alternating charcoal filters (ACF) are combined and used to treat wastewater to standards fit for reuse in agriculture. The charcoal can upon saturation be dried and used as fuel. Two different ACF lines were used in parallel after the HRAS: ACF1 with a residence time of 2.5 h and ACF2 with residence time of 5 h. Results show no significant difference (α = 0.05) in the performance of the two filter lines, hence ACF1 with a higher flow rate was considered as optimal. The HRAS effectively removed up to 65% of total suspended solids (TSS) and 59% of chemical oxygen demand (COD), while ACF1 removed up to 70% TSS and 58% COD. The combined treatment system of HRAS and ACF1 effectively decreased TSS and COD on average by 89 and 83%, respectively. Total ammonium nitrogen (TAN) and total phosphates (TP) were largely retained in the effluent with average removal percentages of 19.5 and 27.5%, respectively, encouraging reuse for plant growth. Key words: A-stage, sustainable wastewater treatment, resource recovery, developing countries, water reuse, nutrient management, agriculture.
Highlights
Humans depend on water for most aspects of life.The diverse utilization of water coupled with population explosion across many places in the world has made it a scarce resource
This study proposes and investigates the concept of the state-of-the-art of low cost small scale wastewater treatment plant which allows for wastewater reuse
Wastewater samples were taken from the effluent of the last filter columns thrice a week; and chemical oxygen demand (COD), total suspended solids (TSS), total ammonium nitrogen (TAN), Total phosphorus (TP), and colony forming units (CFU)
Summary
Humans depend on water for most aspects of life. The diverse utilization of water coupled with population explosion across many places in the world has made it a scarce resource. Re-use of wastewater for some purposes such as agriculture is an indispensable part of integrated water management and would decrease water scarcity This requires a change in perceptions as well as availability of simple, low cost and effective technologies. It is important to explore locally available materials and simple technologies in order to achieve cost effective and sustainable systems Charcoal is such a material and it is ubiquitously available in Uganda. Its performance compared well with other media like gravel, sand rocks and zeolite, attaining its continued use is still a challenge For this reason, this study proposes and investigates the concept of the state-of-the-art of low cost small scale wastewater treatment plant which allows for wastewater reuse. The porosity and dry bulk density of the packed charcoal after crushing were determined
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