MBR-based WWTP for the Hospital industry
There are 1,05,000 hospitals worldwide. And there are 43,486 private hospitals and approximately 25,778 public hospitals in India alone. Why is this hospital number important?
Well, about 2% of municipal wastewater comes from Hospitals. It has been identified that hospital wastewater contains dangerous pathogens, viruses, and microbes discharged into the receivingp water bodies.
Now imagine, all the viruses and microbes are directly entering the water bodies without any treatment, contaminating the freshwater resource. Hence, the cycle of water contamination continues, causing respiratory diseases, an outbreak of diseases, and causing public health deterioration.
Therefore, the proper treatment of wastewater is essential. It is becoming more and more important to develop techniques that have high efficacy, less discharge, are easy to operate and monitor, and are effective for removing viruses and bacteria from hospital wastewater.
Recently, more attention has been paid to membrane bioreactor (MBR) technology for hospital wastewater treatment.
Because:
- It offers higher efficiency in pollutant removal
- It has excellent effluent quality
- It causes low/zero sludge production
- The plant is compact
- It causes lower energy consumption
- Higher disinfection effect
- fewer disinfection by-products (DBPs) formation
- lower acute toxicity
In addition, with the help of a membrane filter, some suspended substances and big molecule matter can be eliminated. Thus, the turbidity of effluent is reduced to below 0.2 NTU.
In the past, membranes have been considered unsuitable for wastewater treatment due to high operating costs caused by the low resilience of the then-available membranes, which were generally unreliable, and had only a short operation period between cleaning cycles.
However, increasingly stringent standards and decreasing costs are making MBR systems for hospital wastewater treatment more economically viable. Similarly, if the membrane is fouled, it can easily be replaced with better and more effective membranes such as those offered by Imemflo.
Furthermore, hospital management will have to invest in the MBR technology once, and they can forget about spending money on the plant for the next 20-25 years, as it offers extended life.
Therefore, MBR technology has large application potential in public-sensitive regional wastewater treatment around the world.
