Abstract
Water reuse and recycling is gaining momentum as a way to improve the circularity of cities, while recognizing the central role of water within a circular economy (CE) context. However, such interventions often depend on the location of wastewater treatment plants and the treatment technologies installed in their premises, while relying on an expensive piped network to ensure that treated wastewater gets transported from the treatment plant to the point of demand. Thus, the penetration level of treated wastewater as a source of non-potable supply in dense urban environments is limited. This paper focuses on the demonstration of a sewer mining (SM) unit as a source of treated wastewater, as part of a larger and more holistic configuration that examines all three ‘streams’ associated with water in CE: water, energy and materials. The application area is the Athens Plant Nursery, in the (water stressed) city of Athens, Greece. SM technology is in fact a mobile wastewater treatment unit in containers able to extract wastewater from local sewers, treat it directly and reuse at the point of demand even in urban environments with limited space. The unit consists of a membrane bioreactor unit (MBR) and a UV disinfection unit and produces high quality reclaimed water for irrigation and also for aquifer recharge during the winter. Furthermore, a short overview of the integrated nutrient and energy recovery subsystem is presented in order to conceptualise the holistic approach and circularity of the whole configuration. The SM technology demonstrates flexibility, scalability and replicability, which are important characteristics for innovation uptake within the emerging CE context and market.
Highlights
IntroductionBy keeping the current situation—the discharge of untreated sewage, the partially treated wastewater from industry combined with unsustainable techniques used in agriculture—the degradation of water quality will continue to increase in the decade, more intense in dry and poor countries [4]
This situation has led to an increased interest to explore alternative solutions to reduce waste and resource usage, the dominant behaviour of ‘take-make-consumedispose’, which assumes that resources are abundant, available and competitive to dispose of needs to be eliminated and. embrace ‘circular economy’ principles and technological innovation
The previous 2 months, the unit was working with clean water for assessing the automations and testing the performance of the pumping station and the hybrid membrane bioreactor unit (MBR)/UV pilot system
Summary
By keeping the current situation—the discharge of untreated sewage, the partially treated wastewater from industry combined with unsustainable techniques used in agriculture—the degradation of water quality will continue to increase in the decade, more intense in dry and poor countries [4]. This situation has led to an increased interest to explore alternative solutions to reduce waste and resource usage, the dominant behaviour of ‘take-make-consumedispose’, which assumes that resources are abundant, available and competitive to dispose of needs to be eliminated and. Some measures that can be implemented, based on the principles of the circular economy (CE) model are to reuse by keeping water either within one system (closed loop) or redirecting it for use in other systems or communities
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