By Gowthaman Desingh, Director – Technology, Transwater Systems
Conventional wastewater treatment consists of a combination of physical, chemical, and biological processes and operations to remove solids, organic matter and, sometimes, nutrients from wastewater. General terms used to describe different degrees of treatment, in order of increasing treatment level, are preliminary, primary, secondary, and tertiary and/or advanced wastewater treatment. In Urban cities, majority of the Sewage/Waste Water treatment plant does the primary and secondary treatment addressing the reduction of BOD, COD, TSS, Ammonical Nitrogen, etc to meet the disposal norms but not completely eliminating them. Due to this treated sewage has a limited scope of utilization like toilet flushing, gardening& landscaping due to the stages of treatment involved. Due to rapid urbanization, cities are facing daunting task of supplying potable water to the residents & safe disposal of waste water. Increasing shortfall in the water supply, Cities have to look at alternate sustainable source of water like rain water, reusing of treated waste water, etc.
Existing Scenario:
BWSSB (Bangalore Water Supply &Sewerage Board) depends on Cauvery River for the water demands of the city and it spends huge cost in pumping 1475 MLD of water every day and it supply it to the residents at subsidized rates.
Bangalore Water Supply Demand Gap
With close to 5000 apartments in Bangalore, majority of them have their in-house waste water treatment plant and re-use portion of the treated waste water. Remaining treated sewage is drained which gets mixed with untreated waste water and make it inutile. Apart from that, BWSSB (Bangalore Water Supply &Sewerage Board) has an installed STP capacity of 1112 MLD.Commercial, Industrial & Institutional water use in Bangalore alone stood close to 400 MLD which is majorly catered by the fresh water currently.
Way Forward: Increasing the quality of treated sewage upto potable standards and supply them to the industries will reduce the demand for fresh water. Pollution Control Boards (PCB’s) started enforcing new guidelines to install the advanced waste water treatment technologies like (Membrane Bio Reactor) MBR or to add Ultra Filtration (UF) System to the conventional waste water treatment technologies to improve the quality of waste water further to increase the utilization. With the advent of new membrane technologies, recovering potable quality water has become practically viable and it can be implemented even at lower volume. However, there are few challenges which needs to be addressed which will make it economically viable.
Challenges: 8 Guidelines: Currently PCBs are recommending to use the treated waste water in residential complexes to use in the toilets & flushing, in case of Municipal Body it is recommended to use for landscaping, parks, etc. Guidelines to be created for increased utilization of treated waste water for construction, Industries, Cooling towers, etc.
8 Awareness: Awareness to be created among Industries to use the treated waste water to be used for Industrial activities and it has to be incentivised.
8 Incentivise the Service Provider& residential complexes: Currently the Service providers are liable to pay GST for recovering and supplying the potable water recovered from waste water which increases the cost of the water. Power subsidies can be provided to the residential complexes, especially for the deployment of potable water recovery system. We at Transwater Systems, help the commercial spaces& Residential Complexes to install our BOSON White Water System, which help them in recovering potable water from their waste water. Over the past 3 years, we helped over 5 commercial spaces to recover approx. 900 ML of potable water from their waste water. In one of the commercial malls, who were spending close to 6 lakhs a month in chemicals & water to run the cooling towers. By using the high-quality potable water recovered from BOSON White Water System,they reduce the operation cost of cooling towers by 50% and they reduce the environmental impact of disposing the treated waste water. BOSON white water system is a fully automated system comes with real time monitoring system to measure the quality of water. With the help of using the AI/ML and predictive analysis our systems have 99.9% uptime thereby providing the continuous supply of high-quality water to our clients.
