Recycling Processes for Wastewater

1.0 INTRODUCTION

Recycling water in Canada is an important issue to understand and implement because of its wide ranging benefits in environmental matters. Canadian wastewater can be recycled by water treatments, each of these treatments results in varying water qualities, and these varying water qualities can be reused for industrial, unrestricted access or restricted access uses. Recycling wastewater is a crucial part of sustainable development; however, many communities in Canada are not active participants of this subject. Although wastewater reclamation and reuse projects are generally complex and require much planning and investment, the benefits are rewarding. When reusing water environmental care is practiced to not pollute and to recover an easily renewable resource. It is opportunistic to address the issue of water reuse and apply the practices to this field of work.

2.0 WATER TREATMENTS

There are various levels of treatment when recycling wastewater, each removing contaminants to certain extents. These are grouped as preliminary, primary, secondary, and tertiary treatments. The combination of treatment levels creates a full recycling process. A general process is shown in Figure 1.

Fig. 1 Flow Chart of General Wastewater Treatment Processes.

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2.1 Preliminary Treatment

Preliminary treatment includes removal of gross solids such as large objects, rags, and grit. As shown in Fig. 1, first the inflowing water (influent) undergoes preliminary treatment through practices of screening and grit removal. Screening is simply water flowing through screens to remove large materials. While grit removal is the practice of adjusting the velocity of the influent to allow the settlement of sand, grit, and stones. ...

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