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Sustainable Reuse of Municipal Wastewater: Innovations and Challenges

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A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Sustainability and Applications".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 September 2022) | Viewed by 7252

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Special Issue Editors

Dr. Anna Laura Eusebi

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Assistant Guest Editor

Department of Science and Engineering of Materials, Environment and Urban Planning-SIMAU, Marche Polytechnic University, 60131, Ancona, Italy
Interests: water and wastewater treatment; resource recovery; environmental sustainability; nutrients recovery; membrane technologies; water reuse

Dr. Nicola Frison

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Assistant Guest Editor

Department of Biotechnology, University of Verona, 37134, Verona, Italy
Interests: water and wastewater treatment; resource recovery; environmental sustainability; biorefinery; environmental impact assessment

Dr. Çağrı Akyol

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Chief Guest Editor

Department of Green Chemistry and Technology, Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, Ghent University, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
Interests: water and wastewater treatment; resource recovery; environmental sustainability; anaerobic digestion; composting; contaminants of emerging concern

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Changes in the climate toward warmer and drier conditions together with the over-demand for water will result in serious impacts on available water resources and create water stress. In addition to depleting the quantity of available water resources, climate change is also expected to contribute to deteriorating the quality of surface and groundwater (i.e., salinization, contamination). This will eventually boost the demand for finding local solutions and using nonconventional water resources, especially in water-scarce areas where the lack of good quality of irrigation water is already limiting agriculture. At this point, reclaimed wastewater reuse can help to address these issues, but its potential remains largely untapped from a practical and legislative point of view. In fact, the reuse of reclaimed water relies on many types of advances not only related to technological approaches, but also health, socioeconomic, and legal aspects.

Accordingly, this Special Issue welcomes research and review papers related to sustainable municipal wastewater treatment and reuse in an integrated approach. The collection of relevant papers under this umbrella can help to maximize the environmental benefits and minimize the undesired impacts of reclaimed water reuse.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

Innovation and optimization in water reclamation;
Novel technologies to valorize municipal wastewater;
The need to consider contaminants of emerging concern in wastewater treatment to enable water reuse;
Pathogen-associated microbial risks;
The role of membrane-based wastewater technologies;
Water–energy–food–climate–ecosystem nexus;
Models, tools, and possible digital solutions to WWTP and reclamation managers;
Life cycle-based tools (LCA, LCC) to provide a holistic environmental and economic assessment sustainable reuse;
Plant and soil studies on agricultural reclaimed water reuse;
Precise irrigation and smart agriculture for reclaimed water;
How to overcome legislative barriers for reclaimed water reuse;
Safety aspects and planning of treated wastewater use;
Socioeconomic impact of water reuse and public acceptance.

Dr. Çağrı Akyol
Dr. Anna Laura Eusebi
Dr. Nicola Frison
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

circular bioeconomy
digitalization
energy and material recovery from municipal wastewater
irrigation/fertigation
municipal wastewater treatment
water–energy–food–ecosystem–climate nexus
water re-use

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

17 pages, 3273 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Wastewater Treatment Performance of Aerated Lagoons, Activated Sludge and Constructed Wetlands under an Arid Algerian Climate

by Oum Elkheir Bachi, Mohammed Tahar Halilat, Samia Bissati, Nadhir Al-Ansari, Sofiane Saggai, Saber Kouadri and Hadee Mohammed Najm

Sustainability 2022, 14(24), 16503; https://doi.org/10.3390/su142416503 - 9 Dec 2022

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1782

Abstract

Water pollution reduces the availability of fresh water, especially in arid areas suffering from water stress, and also adversely affects soil, vegetation and environmental processes. Wastewater treatment processes aim to reduce environmental degradation and increase water availability by improving the quality of wastewater to a standard suitable for irrigation. This paper compares the performance of three wastewater treatment processes: (i) aerated lagoon (AL), (ii) activated sludge (AS), and (iii) constructed wetland (plant beds, PB) under the arid climate of Algeria. The statistical analysis focused on the comparison between the removal rates of the physical (SS) and biological pollution (BOD₅ and COD) parameters in the three stations during 8 years of operation. Obtained results show that the maximum removal rates were observed in the AS process and the minimum were in the AL process. The comparison between the removal rates for a given parameter has shown that there is a significant difference between the AL process on the one hand and the AS and PB processes on the other hand. For the last two processes, AS and PB, there is a difference, but it is not statistically significant. For the values of the parameters of wastewater leaving the three systems, results showed that there is a seasonal variation in the average values of the parameters (temperature effect) and that with the exception of orthophosphate, the values recorded are, for the most part, below the values of Algerian discharge standards, WHO standards and FAO standards. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Reuse of Municipal Wastewater: Innovations and Challenges)

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21 pages, 5110 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Assessing the Performance of Environmentally Friendly-Produced Zerovalent Iron Nanoparticles to Remove Pharmaceuticals from Water

by Iliana Panagou, Constantinos Noutsopoulos, Christiana Mystrioti, Evridiki Barka, Elena Koumaki, Maria Kalli, Simos Malamis, Nymphodora Papassiopi and Daniel Mamais

Sustainability 2021, 13(22), 12708; https://doi.org/10.3390/su132212708 - 17 Nov 2021

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 1884

Abstract

Nano zerovalent iron (nZVI), produced from green tea extracts, was incorporated in a cation exchange resin (R-nFe) to investigate its performance regarding the removal of four non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs): ibuprofen (IBU), naproxen (NPX), ketoprofen (KTP) and diclofenac (DCF). The effect of contact time, NaCl pretreatment, pH, R-nFe dose, the role of the supporting material, the initial concentration of pollutants, and the combined effect of nZVI with oxidative reagents was assessed through a series of batch experiments. According to the results, the best removal efficiencies obtained for DCF and KTP were 86% and 73%, respectively, at 48 h of contact time with NaCl pretreated R-nFe at a dose of 15 g L⁻¹ and a pH of 4. The maximum removal efficiency for NPX was 90% for a contact time of 60 min with PS 1 mM and a pH of 3, which was quite similar to the experiment with a greater contact time of 48 h without PS addition. The maximum IBU removal was 70%; this was reached at pH 3, with a contact time of 30 min and R-nFe 15 g L⁻¹. To the authors’ best knowledge, this is the first study investigating the utilization of nZVI, produced from leaf extracts and incorporated into a cationic exchange resin, to remove NSAIDs from water. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Reuse of Municipal Wastewater: Innovations and Challenges)

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13 pages, 1009 KiB

Open AccessEditor’s ChoiceArticle

Water-Energy-Food-Climate Nexus in an Integrated Peri-Urban Wastewater Treatment and Reuse System: From Theory to Practice

by Enrico Marinelli, Serena Radini, Çağrı Akyol, Massimiliano Sgroi, Anna Laura Eusebi, Gian Battista Bischetti, Adriano Mancini and Francesco Fatone

Sustainability 2021, 13(19), 10952; https://doi.org/10.3390/su131910952 - 1 Oct 2021

Cited by 13 | Viewed by 2836

Abstract

This paper develops a framework for the identification, assessment and analysis of the water reuse-carbon-energy-food-climatic (WEFC) nexus in an integrated peri-urban wastewater treatment and reuse system. This methodology was applied to the municipal wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) of Peschiera Borromeo (Milan, Italy) and its peri-urban district to define the most possible affirmations and conflicts following the EU regulations 741/2020. Results of this work showed that transferring the WEFC nexus from theory to practice can realize sustainable resource management in the operating environment by providing a reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, overall energy savings, reduction in water stress and optimization of agricultural practices. Particularly, it was found that if the plant configuration is upgraded to reach water quality class C for water reuse, instead of wastewater discharge, energy savings are estimated to reach up to 7.1% and carbon emissions are supposed to be reduced up to 2.7%. In addition, enhancing water quality from class C to class A resulted in increments in energy and carbon footprint of 5.7% and 1.7%, respectively. Nevertheless, higher quality crops can be cultivated with reclaimed water in class A, with bigger economic revenues and high recovery of nutrients (e.g., recovery of 154,450 kg N/y for tomato cultivation). Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Reuse of Municipal Wastewater: Innovations and Challenges)

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