Korea has suffered from chronic water shortage problem due to severe seasonal variation of rainfall and locally unbalanced distribution of water resource. Recently, industrial development has involved population growth around urban areas and has creat...
Korea has suffered from chronic water shortage problem due to severe seasonal variation of rainfall and locally unbalanced distribution of water resource. Recently, industrial development has involved population growth around urban areas and has created more water demand bath domestic and industrial purposes. Without special countermeasures, water shortage problem is expected to grow rapidly in the future.
As of 2002, two-hundreds of publicly owned wastewater treatment plant(POWTP) are constructed and operated. From these plant, about twenty million tons of the effluent(from domestic wastewater) are daily discharged into water bodies, which amounts to significant portion of total attainable water resources.
Recently, reuse of the effluent has been becoming major issues for various sides of government organizations, academic fields and water industries to use potentially one of the most stable sources of water thus preparing for possible water shortage in the future.
Reuse system of the effluent was introduced in 1991 by the revision of waterworks law. However, its practical application is still at the initial stage. Since 1990, some reuse studies were started, but most of the studies have been focused mostly on developing treatment processes for specific reuse purpose, but the effluent itself such as statistical aspects and stability of the water qualities have not been studied yet for evaluating the reuse potential.
This study contents were consisted of three part. In first subject, effect of the various sampling frequencies on the performance was investigated by using 1-year effluent data. There was no significant difference between results by daily sampling and by a five-day interval sampling. In addition, the result was the same for both of the tests extracted data sets equally and randomly. When the variation of effluent quality during the period of five-days interval sampling exceeds a permit criteria(sum of the mean and standard deviation), we have to switch back to daily sampling until the data meet the criteria. For the BOD_(5), it took four consecutive days of sampling from five-days sampling frequency to return the criteria.
In second subject, nine plants from whole two-hundred POWTPs were selected. Effluent from those plants was intensively monitored during one years period. Their performances, stabilities, and reuse potentials were evaluated in terms of suitability for specific reuse. Most of the water quality parameters were log normally distributed as reported in literature. The stability coefficients proved stable through the period study except for several plants. Reuse potential was evaluated by comparing its criteria(or guideline) with effluent quality. Most of the parameters were acceptable for agricultural and stream flow except organic matters, coliform bacteria and lead. To satisfy the organic matter's water criteria for reuse, it needed at least sand filteration and activated carbon process. The result of the cost and benefit analysis showed that the recycle rate should be over 25% for charge. The study also showed that it was more beneficial to design 20,000 ton/day for the bigger scale plants and 7,000 ton/day for the small and medium scale plants when the reuse rate was 25% of the recycle rate. If we are going to supply the secondary effluent for stream flow and agricultural reuse, we need to set the proper nutrient control and add the proper nutrient items to the water quality criteria.