When a municipality or business wants to reuse their wastewater, some applications require more treatment than others due to the quality of the wastewater. Many standard wastewater treatment systems consist of pretreatment, primary treatment, and secondary treatment stages. By the end of the secondary stage, a majority of the pollutants, solids, organics, inorganics, and metals have been removed or reduced. This is where reverse osmosis wastewater treatment can be utilized in a third stage process.
A Q&A with scientist Jeff Urban, who explains forward osmosis and how Berkeley Lab is pushing the frontiers of this emerging technology
Isn’t it ironic that our beautiful blue planet, covered 70 percent with water, is struggling to meet citizens’ water needs? Yes, and the reasons are obvious. Out of the Earth’s total water, less than 3 percent is available as freshwater, and a portion of it is actually accessible. Uneven distribution of fresh waterbodies and population across the globe further skew water supply and demand ratios. Also, climate change, deforestation, desertification, droughts, floods, and depletion of natural waterbodies resulting from anthropogenic and natural activities add to these miseries.
The technology is ready, but is the world ready? The seismic shift toward water reuse will occur only as driving circumstances reach their tipping point.
Everyone is familiar with the water cut statistics: three to seven barrels of produced water emerge from the ground per barrel of oil. This oft-cited statistic is useful to appreciate the scale of the volumes of water produced in the Permian Basin. However, it does not tell the whole story.
Water is essential to life. And it is a very precious commodity in Israel, home to 9 million people living in a rocky desert that receives about 10 inches of rain a year. By comparison, Denver, considered semi-arid, gets about 15 inches of rain a year, which is about a fourth of the precipitation a tropical city such as Miami receives.
Collaborative research is a critical element for identifying unforeseen risks associated with using the oil industry’s wastewater outside the oilfield. That’s the recommendation of a new peer-reviewed paper accepted this week in the Journal of Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management (IEAM).
Denver Water is redeveloping its 35-acre operations complex with an eye on more than just delivering water.
This is the second of two articles looking at the increasing reliance of Australian cities on desalination plants to supply drinking water, with less emphasis on the alternatives of water recycling and demand management. So what is the best way forward to achieve urban water security?
Most people think as little as possible about the wastewater that is produced daily from their showers, bathtubs, sinks, dishwashers and toilets. But with the right techniques, it can become a valuable resource.
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