12. Wastewater Treatments Plants and Their Technological Advances

The biggest challenge of the twenty-first century is the provision of pure and affordable water to meet up human needs. Water supply is struggling to keep up the pace with the ever-increasing demand worldwide, which is being aggravated by various factors like population explosion, rapid urbanization, water quality deterioration and global climatic change. Continued depletion of freshwater resources, has shifted the focus more towards the recovery, reuse, and recycling of water, which mandates advanced wastewater treatment. Numerous innovations have been observed in the field of water treatment in the last few years, which have resulted in the blooming of better alternatives to conventional wastewater treatment systems. Some of those technologies are nanotechnology, Membrane Filtration bioreactors, an advanced oxidation process (AOP) and microbial fuel cells which have promising prospects and broad applications. These new treatment technologies have been proven to remove a wide range of challenging contaminants from wastewater successfully. These revolutionary techniques in the field of wastewater treatment have been discussed in this chapter.