Even treated wastewater from WWTP may affect rivers and other natural waterbodies

While for most of us; when we press the flush in our toilets, the issue ends there.. But for the Civic body, City Administration and the WWTP/STP Service Provider, it is just the beginning. There is a lot that goes into keeping our city and environment clean and healthy.

A detailed study confirmed that even treated wastewater from WWTP may affect rivers and other natural waterbodies. There are many reasons for this and each of those reasons can be addressed with careful planning, mindful architecture and meticulous implementation.

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Therefore, Iramai Advance Systems advocates a 360o approach when it comes to Waste Water Treatment Plants (WWTP) or Sewage Treatment Plants STP) projects.

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Some of the Government projects where we were engaged in different capacities, the approach was found to be of building ULCSTP; solely driven by the thought of operations cost optimization by reducing manpower needed to manage the plant(s).

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This can backfire badly if other design aspects are not factored by the System Integrator organization selected by the Government body / Municipal Corporation.

Here is Iramai's take on this subject:

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???????ULCSTP requires a huge capital investment and land area to construct and operate.

???????ULCSTP; with its humongous scale of operation, may produce vast quantities of pungent smelling gas spreading across the city and the very large capacity pumps used in such facilities are reported to create noise that can affect the nearby residents and wildlife.

???????ULCSTP across the globe have also been reported to create hybrid bacteria or viruses that can be resistant to treatment or harmful to humans and animals. This is caused due to mixing/collection of multiple inlets of Wastewater from different regions/sectors; which may have a different underlying ecosystem and list of pathogens.

???????ULCSTP setups leave much bigger environmental footprint by generating huge amount of sludge, greenhouse gases and other by-products that need to be disposed of properly. This last stage of the ULCSTP is at times ignored and undo the good done by the great investments done by the government body / municipal corporation.

???????Issues with Disaster Management:

• 120-MLD or 75-MLD or 45-MLD are huge capacities. In case of technical glitch or failure, this huge volume of untreated water would need to be released into river, nullifying the project's effect; endangering lives of citizens and even resulting in heavy penalties by National Green Tribunal.
• Most parts of the world and India are facing frequent flooding issues. Most cities therefore face challenges of failed centralized STP facilities due to flooding.

???????Operational Hazard:

• Such huge capacities need equally huge capacities of Storage/Retention tanks with Double-Wall technology. However, in case of large earthquake or a targeted bomb blast, the sludge can get spread in given region thereby spreading diseases.

???????Power Requirement and Management:

• Large capacity STP also needs very large capacity Pumps; which may not be viable to be run using currently available options of renewable energy such as Solar Energy. Whereas a smaller capacity (say 300-KLD) STP can be operated using Solar Pumps.

???????Land Acquisition Requirement:

• While initially planning of ULCSTP at single site may seem easy task for land acquisition; but failed discussions may delay the project indefinitely while modular approach will be much easier to take off if we look at it by following right procedure and steps. What matters in the end is the larges good that can be achieved instead of building a larger site/plant.

Therefore, Iramai Advance Systems propose setting up and operating such STP facilities at multiple tributaries flowing in to the main River being considered as the primary point of focus of given project/tender.

Such distributed approach would help City Administration have better control on the overall process, mitigate risks and avoid untreated run-off water in case heavy flooding.

With this, instead of one mega facility, multiple MCSTP sites (viz. around 15 or 20 different STP) should be developed under that given mission.

Give us a call or write to us and we will be more than happy to help!

We can discuss on following aspects:

• Understanding the operational challenges associated with Ultra Large Capacity STP.
• Discuss reasons for failures of traditional approach to Wastewater treatment.
• Discuss alternate design considerations and benefits.
• Modular approach – Golden rule of SLA and disaster management.
• Cost – Performance Analysis of different design considerations.
• Tender specifications, budgeting & finalization of implementation agency.
• Operations & maintenance phase guidelines.
• Onboarding of implementation partner and providing handholding support till project completion.

Let’s make things simple!

Milind Pagar

+91-9920949497

[email protected]

https://www.iramai.co.in