Sustainable Energy Management Benchmark at Wastewater Treatment Plant

Andrey Kiselev,Elena Magaril,Elena Cristina Rada,Maria Chiara Zanetti,Deborah Panepinto,Marco Ravina

doi:10.3390/su132212885

Abstract

Urban wastewater effluents bring large amounts of nutrients, organic matter, and organic microcontaminants into freshwater ecosystems. Ensuring the quality of wastewater treatment (WWT) is one of the main challenges facing the management of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). However, achievement of high-quality standards leads towards significant energy consumption: usually the more intensive WWT process requires additional energies. Energy efficiency at WWTP is actual mainstream on the current sustainable development agenda. The WWTP processes and methods can be considered from the standpoint of material and energy flows according to circular economy paradigm, which offers great possibilities to reuse waste originating from WWT in order to receive renewable energy. The correlation between energy and quality issues to evaluate WWTP efficiency is of a great scientific and practical interest. The main goal of the paper is to check the dependency between these two main issues in WWTP management—WWT quality and energy efficiency—and to determine possible limits of such relation. The municipal sewerage system of Ekaterinburg, Russia was studied within this paper. The total length of centralized sewerage system in Ekaterinburg is over 1500 km of pipes within two main sewerage basins: northern and southern. The methodological framework for the current research consisted of three steps: (i) WWT quality evaluation, (ii) energy efficiency evaluation, and (iii) WWTP Quality/Energy (Q/E) efficiency dependency matrix. For the purpose of research, authors investigated the 2015–2018 period. The results showed that the outputs correlate with the technical conditions of WWTPs and the implementation of the best available techniques (BATs): most of the northern WWTP values are referred to the green zone (good rank), while the southern WWTP values are situated generally in the orange zone (unsatisfactory rank). The proposed methodological approach for Q/E dependency of WWT process creates a strong but simple tool for managers to evaluate the current success of the operation of WWTP and progress towards circular economy practices implementation.

Highlights

Samples through laboratory control, analyzed for six subWWT sampleswere werecollected collected through laboratory control, analyzed formain six main stances, and averaged into annual values
Speaking about the impact on the environment, the authors in this focused water use, zone means that wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) have either an effective treatment technology withon the achievethe impact on the environment, the authors in this study focused on water use, because thestandard impact that has on water bodies significantly the impact on ment of the quality of discharged wastewater without the exceeds use of modern energybecause the impact that WWTP has on water bodies significantly exceeds the impact on any othersolutions, environments
Conclusions eral WWTPs, but the visualization of hundreds of WWTPs will lead to poor readability

Summary

Introduction

Humans and their activities produce wastewaters that are generally referred to as ‘urban wastewaters’, which are generally a mix of metabolic residues from humans and drainage waters [1]. WWTPs act as terminal shields for urban cities to protect the water environment from contamination and achieve water resource circulation [2]. Urban wastewater effluents bring large amounts of nutrients, organic matter, and organic microcontaminants into freshwater ecosystems [3]. Ensuring the quality of WWT is one of 4.0/).

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion