Sustainability Seminar Series: Moving Conventional Waste Water Treatment Plants into Water Resources Recovery Facilities

Presenter: Professor Ahmed ElDyasti (PEng)
The future vision for waste water treatment plants (WWTPs) is to no longer consider these facilities as an activity for removing pollutants but a facility that can couple the treatment process with the generation of value-added products, which are known as water resources recovery facilities (WRRFs). However, the definition of the WRRF is still ambiguous and various applications are under research to define different strategies to upgrade the WWTPs into WRRFs.
Different biotechnologies can be integrated to play a key role in the development of WRRFs. In this seminar, the audience will hear about the three main objectives that were set to evaluate the possibility of integrating two promising biotechnologies within WRRFs. The primary focus of this talk is to provide a high-level overview of the next generation of waste water treatment plants using biofilm processes and their integration to maximize energy and value-added products recovery, including biomethane, biohydrogen, and biopower, in accordance with the emerging paradigm shift towards mining resources from waste water.
The need forwaste water treatment plants to reduce power consumption and carbon footprint is driving this technology development. The new generation of such bioprocesses will include the application of sustainable novel biological reactors coupled with the recovery of the value-added products and energy that are generated in such a process, as well as the use of energy-efficient processes to transform “energy-consuming treatment processes” into “energy-saving and energy-positive systems.”