Sustainable Treatment of Emerging Pollutants in the Context of India

Abstract

Emerging pollutants have been increasingly studied over the past decade to improve our understanding of their fate, occurrence and toxicological effects on the environment and human health. The aim of this research is to develop a model that calculates the removal of emerging pollutants in India using different treatment unit processes. Different wastewater treatment scenarios based in India were defined considering several variables and factors including: influent water quality, intended use of effluents, available resources, operational envelop and treatment efficiency of technologies. WiSDOM Tool was used to find optimal wastewater trains/packages for treatment keeping in view technical, environmental, social and economic aspects. The tool also evaluates the performance of each optimal solution in terms of removal of current pollutants (such as BOD, COD, TN, TP, FC etc.) using multi-objective genetic algorithms and multi-criteria decision analysis. An Excel spreadsheet model was developed, where the treatment trains (generated/selected by the WiSDOM tool) were passed through to determine the removal efficiency of emerging pollutants. Each emerging pollutant has different physical and chemical properties and therefore, each compound should be monitored separately to generate the optimum removal. Further research is required to bridge the knowledge gap regarding emerging pollutants and their removal during treatment.