Integrated Wastewater Reuse System for Autonomy in Water Supply

Abstract

Potable water is essential for all aspects of life and sustainable development. However, over 2 billion people live in countries experiencing high water stress. In addition, over 80% of the world’s wastewater is released to the environment without treatment. To solve these problems Veolia proposes a Reuse pilot to transform wastewater into drinking water. The pilot is designed to be a closed loop that could provide complete water autonomy to any facility. The main objectives of this project are to produce potable water from wastewater, to operate in a closed loop system, to ensure reliability and performance of the process and to demonstrate financial viability. The pilot consists of processes such as phytoremediation, micro-granular activated carbon adsorption assisted by ozonation, ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis. We succeed in producing water with drinking quality according to french legislation. The system is not a closed loop yet but we achieved a reliable hydraulic balance control that allows us to close the system in the near future. The performance of the system is reliable, in one year and three months approximately 142,6 m3 of water have been treated and not even once the turbidity of UF permeate has reached 1NTU (legislation limit). The permeability of the membrane now is around 55 LMH/bar. In our best scenario the cost of treated water is 6,01 €/m3 while the average cost of water in france is 5 €/m3. We believe that a scale up of the system will decrease the cost per m3 of water produced. In addition, for places with water scarcity the autonomy of water supply is an important advantage.