COMPARISON OF CONVENTIONAL WATER TREATMENT TECHNOLOGIES WITH SOIL BIOTECHNOLOGY

Water security is one of the major concerns all over the world. It’s commonly said that the issue for the rise of the III world war could be water. Many water bodies in India have been adversely polluted or even converted to nallahs (eg, the Nazafgarh Nallah was earlier a river namely Sahibi). Out of many reasons, the main reason form this pollution is that 40% of the untreated wastewater is directly disposed into rivers. Many industries in India are facing problems in either installing or maintaining water treatment plants. The reason could be any but the result is that the major water resources are being heavily polluted depriving the citizens of clean water. A solution to this problem is to recycle the waste water and reuse it. There are many technologies (such as Activated Sludge Process, Up flow Anaerobic Sludge Blanket process etc.) existing which can efficiently treat the waste water and make it fit for discharge into natural water bodies or even to meet the daily water demands. This work compares the conventional technologies with the innovative Soil Biotechnology (SBT) developed at IIT Bombay. The performances of sewage treatment plants based on activated sludge process (ASP) and SBT, and effluent treatment plants based on rotating biological contactor (RBC) and SBT were compared. The parameters observed were BOD, COD, TDS and TSS. The economic and environmental aspects were also taken into consideration.