How to Handle Wastewater Treatment and Disposal?

One of our planet’s most critical problems is the water crisis, even if you don’t realize it. Statistics may sound hurtful and shocking to you, but more than one in five people on the planet don’t have a decent toilet, and one in 10 don’t have clean water close to home. So, knowing that about 3 billion people lack facilities to wash their hands at home is not unexpected! These facts are the most striking face of the truth. Also, consider the importance of urban waste water management in these aspects:

• The oceans that turn into garbage due to microplastics and waste
• Pollution of the environment
• Newborn deaths due to lack of safe water
• Increasing climate migrations due to drought and drinking water shortage
• Most importantly, the significance of clean water in production and our lives

Thus, we can understand more clearly why urgent action is needed for safe water. Fortunately, we have a powerful tool to overcome the water crisis, wastewater treatment. So, what is wastewater treatment and disposal? Let’s find out!

What is Wastewater Treatment?

The logic is the same as waste treatment principles. Wastewater is water that has been used and turned into waste. It can contain many substances such as food waste, chemicals, bacterias, and much more occurring anywhere where water is used. For example, everywhere in homes, from the sinks to the dishwashers. 

When the large-scale production wastes of businesses and industries are added, the meaning of wastewater treatment service becomes evident. As a result, its scope range from chemical waste treatment and biological waste treatment to industrial waste treatment and medical waste treatment to hazardous waste treatment.

Types of Wastewater

• Sewage wastewater: It is used in homes, originating from toilets, sinks, or showers.
• Industrial wastewater: It results from production, commercial, and overall industrial activities.
• Municipal wastewater: Some add this as a third category. The municipalities create these wastes, formed by different ratios of sewage water, rain water, and industrial water.

Hence, a proper wastewater treatment system is needed to prevent water pollution and maintain safe water. 

How wastewater treatment works?

Have you ever heard of this phrase: “The solution to pollution is dilution.” This sentence reflects the base of pollution management and means breaking the pollutant’s resistance by adding water. The wastewater treatment process works in this way too.

Nature is very successful in balancing the small number of water pollutants. However, it needs technology to cope with the harmful and enormous impurities that increase due to human activities. Wastewater treatment plants do just that, reducing pollutants as much as possible and discharging back remaining water to nature. So, nature can take care of the rest in its own balance

Wastewater Treatment Plant

Basically, we can say that three different types of wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) as follows:

• Sewage treatment plants (STP): STPs extract sewage waste from households and commercial buildings to keep citizens healthy.
• Effluent Treatment Plants (ETP): As opposed to STP, these plants purify by-products resulting from industrial activities. It is especially used in industries with heavy chemicals, such as pharmaceutical wastewater treatment.
• Demineralization Treatment Plants (DM): These plants completely remove solids or minerals from water for industrial activities. Therefore, with the ion exchange principle, DMs provide the extreme pure water needed in various sectors such as cosmetics, food or beverage, or electronics.

Although the purposes are different, the wastewater treatment cycle in plants is mostly the same. Let’s look at these steps together.

Wastewater Treatment Cycle

• Collection: Municipalities, private firms, or homeowners place collection systems. Then, underground systems or exhauster tracks deliver the collection to the plants.
• Screening and Pumping: Wastewater coming to the facility is accompanied by many complex materials from plastic to wood. These materials are separated and mostly sent to a landfill, and the wastewater goes to the next stage.
• Grit removal: This stage is the continuation of the previous one. Smaller materials such as sand are separated and sent to another area again.
• Primary treatment: It separates solid macrobiotics by pouring the wastewater into big tanks. This way, solid matter settles at the surface for removal by scrappers to be pumped out of the tanks for further treatment. 
• Secondary treatment: It adds seed sludge to the wastewater for breaking down further. First, the air is pumped into aeration tanks that mix the wastewater with a small seed sludge. Hence,  bacteria and other tiny organisms can grow and consume the remaining organics. The wastewater passes through the large tanks for 3-6 hours. The solid matter is directed to digesters for anaerobic digestion. During this process, methane gases and nutrient-rich bio-solid are formed. Bio-solids are recycled and de-watered into local firms, and methane gases are used as a source of energy.
• Tertiary treatment: It removes up to 99 percent of the impurities from the wastewater, like a drinking water quality. Consequently, it requires special equipment, highly skilled wastewater treatment plant operators, chemicals, and a strong energy supply. 
• Disinfection: Diseases-causing organisms require one special operation again. The wastewater must be disinfected for at least 20-25 minutes in tanks that contain a mixture of chlorine and sodium hypochlorite for elimination to protect the health of the animals and people.
• Oxygen uptake: The treated water is aerated to bring the dissolved oxygen up to the permitted level and released into the environment. Remember, pollutant removal is maintained at 98% or greater.
• Sludge treatment: The sludges pumped from the clarifiers and the flow of sludge from the aeration must be treated to reduce volume and produce a usable end product with thickening tanks.

In summary, wastewater treatment is crucial for recycling, as it is essential in terms of health and the environment. However, businesses need a high-quality team, machinery, and seamless process flow to handle complexity and follow strict regulations. Luckily, there is a place that makes every step easier for wastewater treatment businesses, Evreka!

Ensure seamless operations with Evreka

Evreka has expanded its sustainable waste management and recycling solutions to more than 20 countries with the principle of respecting nature and using high-tech. You can manage seamless processes in wastewater treatment plants with an end-to-end, integrated, customizable, and cloud-based system with real-time data. Thanks to Evreka, you will totally eliminate the complexity of wastewater treatment and disposal. But how? Let’s take a brief look at Evreka solutions.

Operations Management

Operations Management software combines all the actions performed to deliver a service on the field to facilitate the work of managers. How would you like to view every detail required for the wastewater treatment plant? Also, these details come with real-time Asset Management and Fleet Management data, which provide efficient collection and route optimization on a single dashboard? No, this is not a dream! This way, managers can:

• Dispatch Management: Managers can have full control of the responsibility area. They can organize, assign and optimize schedules and routes for the services. Also, by dividing the areas into zones according to the type of operations, they can get manageable blocks for bulk operations and other automation. 
• Task Management: Its configurable structure is designed to carry valuable information with templates. With our solution, managers can manage all of your tasks.
• Reporting: All the details can be turned into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights. On the dashboard, managers can see the data summary with visualizations and customization, filter the datasets, and export the data.