Municipal Wastewater Treatment Plants (With Uasb Process) in India: Performance Evaluation and Cost Optimization

In India, as in many other developing countries there are many compete ting demands on the limited finances available for development. Municipal wastewater treatment, though important from the public health and other points of view, is generally given a low priority. It has been observed that, for a long time, there has been a strong bias towards the conventional and more sophisticated solutions in these methods when anything that can reduce the costs and complexities of sewage treatment should have been preferred too. Anaerobic wastewater treatment combined with proper post treatment represents the ideal solution for environmental protection in tropical countries like India where power cuts and failures are also very frequent. Anaerobic treatment is effective in removing biodegradable organic compounds and can be conducted in technically simple systems at any scale and at almost any place. Possibility of using UASB process for the treatment of municipal wastewater is an attractive alternative specially for developing countries like India, where there is a need for low cost and reliable method of wastewater treatment.