Wastewater Reuse–Risk Assessment, Decision-Making and Environmental Security

Çan region is rich in clay mines and lignite deposits. Results of major anioncation and some trace elements in groundwater and surface water around the Çan Plain, showed that groundwater is very reach with calcium-magnesium-sulfate (Ca-Mg-SO₄). Its aluminum (Al) concentrations are more than the acceptable maximum standard value. The results show that mining activity has contaminated water sources. The heavily polluted water is currently under the international standard value around the plain. However, if precautions are not taken, these contaminants may spread in surface water and groundwater.

The Regional Water Databanks (WDB) project is a project implemented within the framework of the Middle East peace process and coordinated by Executive Action Team (EXACT) and recommended by Middle East Multilateral Working Group on Water Resources (WWG) with the aim to promote regional cooperation among Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. The main aim of the regional water data bank project is to improve the joint monitoring, data availability and information exchange among water managers of the three core parties in the Middle East. The EU is financing it since 1995. A decision support system (DSS) for wastewater reuse is presented.

This paper describes a new wastewater treatment concept which was assessed to be technically and economically feasible for suburban and rural areas in Mediterranean countries. The treatment consists of a two-step anaerobic high-rate reactor like upflow anaerobic sludge blanket (UASB) reactor followed by vertical flow constructed wetland (CW) and UV radiation. It fulfills the defined criteria, as meeting the standards for water reuse, costs especially for energy are low, sewage sludge production is limited, and operation and maintenance are simple.

The problem considered in this paper is to coordinate the costs and ecological risks of all stakeholders in the environmental water/wastewater supply chain. Using the concept of the environmental supply chain we construct a corresponding decision tree and a risk matrix, which quantitatively estimate the risk level. We propose an economic-mathematical model permitting to mitigate the integrated risk to population and society under economic, technological and social constraints.

The paper deals with a novel advanced solar-powered wastewater treatment technique based on direct osmosis process. The separation is driven by natural osmosis, which does not require external pumping energy as in the reverse osmosis process. Test results of the constructed pilot device having capacity of 1 m3/h with various wastewater samples taken in villages of Aral Sea region have been discussed. The treated water might be reused as a substitute for potable quality water in many applications.

Israel, a water scarce country, had embarked on a national campaign to develop all its water resources and to integrate into water resources management strategy - recommends a comprehensive water conservation and efficient use of water by all users. This strategy stressed that treated wastewater is a valuable water resource and focused on the total wastewater treatment and reuse as a national objective, and the exchange of the treated effluent with the farmers' fresh water allocations. The Dan Region wastewater project is planned to help Israel face the water shortage issue.

Soil aquifer treatment (SAT) has been practiced in various dry land and semiarid areas as means to reduce environmental risk by improving wastewater quality at disposal sites and to replenish aquifers enabling the use of reclaimed water for nonrestrictive crop irrigation. SAT success is preconditioned by an appropriate site selection, a correct design, and a continuous maintenance. The location of the SAT basins is determined by a multitude of criteria often less than inituitive. This study aims to identify potential sites for SAT in Jerba Island integrating geographic information systems (GIS) tools and the analytical hierarchy process (AHP).

Being one of the most water scarce countries in the world and in a region where water shortage is a major concern; Jordan faces a great challenge to meet water demands and manage its limited hydrological resources. Wastewater reuse can be an option for alternative water resource especially for the agricultural sector. Moreover, wastewater recycling and reuse when properly implemented is consistent, cost effective as well as environmentally sound. Therefore, Jordan has come to recognize the future key role that treated wastewater can play in the development of the country.

Arizona's Groundwater Management Act limits the use of groundwater to meet growing demand for water by the municipal sector. The state's recharge and recovery program allows for water reuse through aquifer recharge and later recovery inside or out of the area of hydrologic impact. The paper discusses water reuse within the municipal sector in Arizona, with a special focus on the Tucson metropolitan area. Increased effluent utilization is playing a more prominent role in long-range planning efforts. The paper focuses on the role of reclaimed water in water management planning. It explains how the use of effluent is influenced by water quality considerations and institutional/legal arrangements.

Wastewater originated from dairy operations may harbor human pathogens including Escherichia coli (EC). Excess nutrients present in dairy wastewater can also pollute surface and ground waters. Effective microbes (EM) and duckweed have shown a great promise in wastewater treatment. The duckweed growth and EM applications were tested. Combined application of EM and duckweed growth significantly reduced the ammonium nitrogen, total phosphorus, total suspended solids and biological oxygen demand after three months and is a very efficient way of dairy wastewater treatment.

The design of water reuse schemes generates a big number of possible treatment trains, which has to match the quality and quantity requirements. The aim of this paper is to describe optimization techniques used by developed decision support tool. This will be followed by the case study to show the possible results of the optimization.

This paper is concerned with a fuzzy extension of the Borda ranking method. Main attention is devoted to the application for the ecological risk ranking under uncertain data. A way to integrate different opinions and knowledge of different experts is proposed. The fuzzy extension also considers the cases of incomparability of expert assessments and missing opinions, as well as indifferent opinions and calibration (semantic or linguistic variables). An application of the considered ranking methodology to study potential ecological risks in the coastal areas of the Island of Tenerife is considered.

Analysis of genotoxicity with plants assays is of a great importance due to pollution of the wastewater and soil by genotoxicants. The objective of these studies was to determine the approach to risk assessment contaminated with radionuclide different wastewater from 30-km zone of the Chernobyl and Kyiv region using the transgenic lines Arabidopsis thaliana L. We used three effective plant assays to evaluate the genotoxicity of Chernobyl and Kyiv region water reservoirs and soil sites. The high, total mutagenic effect was determined in wastewater taken from the lakes Glyboke and Telbin. Received data allow us to develop the approaches to risk assessment for subjective testing wastewater and contaminated with radionuclide water reservoirs and soil sites.

On the basis of formalization of interrelations between global and hydrological changes the mathematical model for optimal water resource management was elaborated. Its distinctive feature is the possibility to investigate regimes with sudden, discontinuous changes or phase transitions as a result of small, continuous changes in variables that influence the water system. Model permits to determine the conditions for sustainable development and the possible mechanisms of chaotic behavior that causes the instability in the area of environmental security.

Enhancing public welfare through the deliberate management of water resources is vital for every society. Pollution, overuse, and consumption challenge a society's ability to develop and sustain water supplies for municipal, agricultural, industrial, and recreational use while protecting fisheries and wetlands. Water resource management decisions are complex and involve risk. This paper identifies a risk taxonomy to help managers identify where those risks are and their severity. It is presented in the context of the Susquehanna River Basin that spans three states in the United States, with management interests at the state, regional, and national levels.

The techniques that involve such comparative assessments are especially convenient for water resources with different quality characteristics. The reuse of the treated effluent of wastewater treatment plants in irrigation is a commonly applied method in semiarid regions such as the Mediterranean where water is a scarce commodity. However, these effluents must be comparatively assessed with other sources of irrigation waters to evaluate the pros and cons of their application particularly in irrigating edible crops.

Eight wells were monitored for a period of seven years. These wells were located upstream, under direct influence of AWSP, along the watercourse where AWSP effluent is discharged. Wells located under the direct influence have shown higher concentrations of pollutants in comparison with the other monitored wells. Comparison of the water quality of the wells with the AWSP influent and effluent quality has shown that AWSP is not the main source of pollution. Additionally, agricultural activities and overpumping practices are the major potential sources of pollution.

Oxidation pond techniques have become very popular with small communities because of their low construction and operating cost and offer a significant financial advantage over other recognized treatment methods. However, in the arid and semiarid regions the salination due to the evaporation is one of the main problems. The present year long study evaluates the use of aerated lagoons system for the treatment of municipal wastewater in Ismailia, Egypt. The treated effluent is presently used for irrigating lumber trees forest around the wastewater treatment plant on the sandy desert soil.

A multidisciplinary water management model was constructed that combines hydrological, technological, economic, and regional planning aspects, and applied it to a case study of two regions in Israel. The model enables to forecast the chloride concentration in the aquifer over time, estimate the cost of different desalination technologies, and plan the supply and treatment of different water resources.

The current demographic scenario of the world shows that the population of developing countries is growing at an unprecedented rate with the increasing scarcity of freshwater resources. Therefore there is a great need to propose appropriate wastewater treatment in such countries to reuse wastewater. Wastewater treatment should not only target pathogens removal but also many compounds named endocrine disruptors (EDCs) which have not been included yet in reuse wastewater legislations. This paper provides information on the fate of EDCs in wastewater treatment, current wastewater legislations and it also summarizes a recently developed decision support tool for decision makers (wastewater technologists and risk analyzers) to improve their decision processes in respect to wastewater treatment and reuse schemes.

A general trend exists toward increasing the salt concentration of surface and ground waters in the semiarid regions of the world. Quantitative knowledge on the interaction between irrigation management and crop yield is becoming increasingly important as water salinities increase. Guidelines for irrigation management with saline waters which have been based on steady-state analyses overpredict the amount of irrigation required, and/or underestimate the yield that can be achieved when irrigating with saline waters.

Water withdrawal and irrigation in arid zones increase salt concentration in aquifers. The utilization of effluent further augments the concentration by adding salt from households and industry. A sustainable salt regime can be maintained if salt is removed from at least some of the water sources. The paper analyzes theoretically the pricing of water and effluent in a sustainable regime for the coastal aquifer in Israel.

A single-year planning model being developed for a region in Israel which consists of a city and three potential wastewater consumers. The model incorporates, in one endogenous system, the economic, physical, and biological relationships in the water-soil-plant-environment system and its objective is to maximize the regional social welfare composed of the sum of agricultural and environmental net benefits. The model determines the optimal crop mix and the optimal allocation of the limited water and land resources among all potential users.

An approach is presented to model the deterioration of buried, infrequently inspected infrastructure, using scarce data. The robustness of the process is combined with the flexibility of fuzzy mathematics to arrive at a decision framework that is tractable and realistic. In applying this approach to sewerage infrastructure, the scoring scheme was converted using current guidelines. A rule-based model is used to replicate and predict the possibility of failure. The model can be used to plan the renewal of the asset subject to maximum risk tolerance. The concepts are demonstrated using data obtained from Canadian municipalities.

The growing number of municipal wastewater treatment plants in Portugal delivers about 500 million m3 of treated wastewater that is discharged in river and coastal waters, representing a pollutant load to receiving waters and yet the waste of water resources which could be successfully used for irrigation in agriculture, landscape, golf courses, water reservoirs for fire protection. Because water reuse can contribute to the economic development it must be stimulated by central, regional, and local authorities, but within the framework of good practices and their monitoring. This paper presents the new Portuguese standard NP 4434 that presents guidelines on water quality, irrigation practice, management of environmental impacts, protection of public and animal health and, aspects of control and monitoring.

The aims of this paper are twofold. First, to investigate farmers' opinion of adoption of a new program, which involves utilization of recycled water to replenish an aquifer. Second, to evaluate the economic viability of this new program. A contingent valuation study is undertaken with 97 farmers located near the Akrotiri aquifer in Cyprus, a common-pool water resource with rapidly deteriorating water quality and quantity. The results reveal that farmers are willing to adopt the new technology, and they derive higher values from a recycled wastewater use program, which provides high quality water, and high water quantity in the aquifer.

After several years of intensive research, study, and consultations with world experts in public health, epidemiology, agronomics, environmental sciences, and engineering, as well as other UN agencies, the WHO, in 2006, has published a revised updated volume of the guidelines for the safe use of wastewater, excreta, and gray water. These new guidelines drafted by a panel of 35 experts are recognized as representing the position of the United Nations system on issues of wastewater, excreta, and gray water use and health by “UN-Water.”

The combination of severe water shortage, densely populated urban areas, and highly intensive irrigated agriculture, makes it essential that Israel put wastewater treatment and reuse high on its list of national priorities. Sewage treatment effluent is the most readily available water source and provides a partial solution to the water scarcity problem. National policy calls for the gradual replacement of freshwater because of the decision to increase the use of effluent and set up a committee to review existing regulations and to recommend new regulations for effluent use for irrigation or disposal to stream and receiving water. The recommended values were designed to minimize potential damage to water sources.

Wastewater treatment plants in Israel treat approximately 500 million cubic meters a year. The high quality treated wastewater is used mainly for large-scale agricultural irrigation. Israel has acquired much experience in adjusting the treatment level of the wastewater treatment plants and the qualities and characteristics of the treated wastewater to land and crops. The economic advantage of utilizing the treated wastewater in agriculture substantiates the policy of assisting recycling plants and farmers, with the reuse of treated wastewater enabling the conversion of expensive freshwater.

Wastewater reuse, along with wastewater treatment facilities are endowed with a number of risks that may inflect some serious damage to man and his environment. Decision construct and decision making of wastewater issues are of prime importance for sound use of wastewater and treatment processes. Equally important is the sound economical attributes wastewater treatment and wastewater alternative methods and construction should manifest. Measures of common use in this respect are mostly dominated by environmental impact assessment, risk assessment, and cost benefit analysis. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is one of the newly emerging techniques with wide application in the field of wastewater reuse and wastewater treatment facilities.

The results of study oxygen's influence on the radiation-thermal decomposition of n-heptane admixtures in water medium are adduced. The main parameters of radiolysis were changed within the limits: temperature 20–400℃, absorbed dose-0÷16.0 kGy at dose rate 3.2 kGy/h. As a product of decomposition are observed H₂, CO, CH₄, C₂H₄, C₂H₆, C₃H₈, C₃H₆, C₄H₈, hydrocarbons C₅-C₆. The changes of n-heptane concentration in the reactor also are established. The increasing of n-heptane decomposition rate and decreasing of gas formation rate in presence of O₂ are observed. As a result of summarizing of experimental data, the kinetic model of processes has been proposed.

Multiple antibiotics resistance of Enterococcus species (ES) was compared in Guánica, Guayanilla, and Mayagüez coastal water. Only 10, 12, and 12% of ES respectively were resistant to chlortetracycline at 10 μg/ml and less than 5% were resistant at 50 μg/ml. However, in Barceloneta coastal water 48% and 28% of ES were resistant to chlortetracycline at 10 and 50 μg/ml respectively. Similar results were obtained using oxytetracycline and salinomycin. Numbers of Enterococcus species resistance to multiple antibiotics were highest in Barceloneta and lowest in Guánica coastal water. Results of multiple antibiotic resistances in Barceloneta River, estuary, and coastal water are presented.

A long-term wastewater irrigation on soil composed of glacial sand resulted in the transformation of the soil profile, which included chemical, microbiological, biochemical, and virological soil characteristics. The individual soil samples contained organic particles by weight, but these particles represented an important storage of nutrient and energy for microorganisms. The wastewater irrigation on a sandy soil resulted in positive effects on soil activities, and did not create any risk through pathogenic bacteria or viruses to a local deep groundwater aquifer.

The toxicology of a human environment is based on the assumption that toxicity of pollutants is directly proportional to their concentration (in wastewater, in aerosphere, and in soil). The calculation method of probability of effect (risk) of toxic pollutants action on the population health is described. The algorithm of risk assessment of pollution impact on a population health is considered. The risk factor (coefficient of a ratio of risk increase) is a function of concentration of toxic substances in an environment: atmosphere, wastewater, soil.

During the last years, several cheese factories had been established in western Anatolia. Due to this positive industrial development, pollution from wastewater discharge has threatened the local environment. On the other hand, this area especially owns a significant renewable energy potential and thereby geothermal energy. These environmentally sound sources are to be applied in thermal wastewater treatment process.

Wastewater has a high potential for reuse in agriculture, especially in arid and semiarid areas. Wastewater reuse increases food production by providing a stable supply of water, and contributes to environmental security by reducing the pollution level of rivers and surface water. It also conserves a significant portion of river basin waters and allows for the disposal of municipal wastewater in a low-cost, sanitary way. A very small percentage of wastewater is currently being used for irrigation in the world. Wastewater collection, its treatment, disposal of waste, and use of treated wastewater is a big challenge to environmental security. This paper discusses the latest research developments in the field of wastewater reuse and the factors affecting environmental security.

Improved wastewater treatment in the Israel and in the West Bank is an important step towards resolving the existing problems of water shortage and pollution in the region. This will enable to increase water availability and quality in the West Bank villages, thereby increasing the social, economic, and environmental sustain ability as well as decreasing the environmental threat of pollution of the groundwater resources. This paper examines different scenarios of water supply, demand, and allocation arrangements in order to reach the optimal decisions on wastewater treatment, based on principles of sustainable development.

The present work aims at highlighting the challenge encountering the environmental management of wastewater in Egypt. In addition, water consumption, industrial, domestic and agricultural pollution, and their adverse impact on water quality is discussed. The weak regularity in compliance and enforcement of the environmental legislation is evaluated. The industrial pollution is at alarming degree.

Irrigation with low quality of treated wastewater in the Jordan Valley has been practiced for several decades. The present study was designed to determine the health effects of this practice on the transmission of two protozoan infections, giardiasis and amoebiasis. Results of this study showed that at the exposed group 73% of the subjects were infected by Giardia and/or Entamoeba histolytica, and only 24% in the control zone. This excess of parasitic infestation may be related to the low quality of wastewater reuse in agriculture.

The technological revolution has brought a great progress in furniture industry which considered as one of the most vital resources in Egypt economy. The government has established a great number of polyester cabins (in Damietta governorate) which used in furniture painting and varnishing. The wastewater is transferred by the same route to the water purification station which according to our research has no proper means to eliminate the polyester hazard. In this work we conducted a survey among the cabin workers to assist their knowledge about the wastewater hazard. Also, we have suggested a strategy to overcome this problem.

Adsorbents are thought to be the most effective method for recovering the low concentrations of uranium from the wastewater. Here we will synthesize the interpenetrating polymer networks (IPN) based on acrylonitrile (AN) and polyethylene glycol (PEG) and using its adsorptive ability for removing uranium from aqueous systems. It was found that the polymeric adsorbent has very highadsorption ability for uranium and can be used in adsorption studies to remove uranium from wastewater. It is to remove uranium and other radioactive elements in their source before mingling to the groundwater. The coal power plants release ashes and they are deposited on the surroundings. Leaching of ash samples to remove toxic, heavy, and radioactive elements before their mingling to the groundwater is studied.

Mankind has utilized water sources and wetlands since their earlier times. As mankind's dependency on water increased, water became a strategic commodity. The process of industrialization has increased the human pressure on the resources, and consumption has become unsustainable. The usable freshwater resources in the world have been significantly declining. The available potential of freshwater resources on the planet Earth is decreasing very rapidly as a direct consequence of unnatural processes including human-induced climate change and globalization aswell- as the lack of proper management strategies. The climate change is likely to create significant droughts in many parts of the World.

Water reuse plays an important role in water resource, wastewater, and ecosystem management in many countries. Reclaimed water reduces discharges to surface waters, recharges groundwater, and postpones costly investment for development of new water sources and supplies. Water reuse involves taking domestic wastewater, giving it a high degree of treatment, and using the resulting highquality reclaimed water for a new, beneficial purpose. This study concerning onto the treatment of wastewater by using new chelating grafted membrane. Application of the prepared membrane in the treatment of wastewater was tested.

Pollutants discharged directly or indirectly into river basins make harm to the whole water ecosystem. According to these reasons it is important to evaluate the pollution load and its economic value to river basin. According to the Directive 2000/60/EC of the European Parliament and the Council of 23 October 2000, establishing a framework for Community action in the field of water policy it is necessary not only to analyze the specific character of the river basin, impact of human activity, but also to make its economic analysis. These factors could make the main basis in the creation of new programs at protecting and improving water ecosystems. In this article, the pollution load of organic compounds and nutrients (total nitrogen and phosphorus) was estimated in the Lithuanian rivers from point and non point sources.