People have always looked at waste water treatment plants like a
part of city which should never exist in their eyesight and most importantly
not in their backyard. But very few would have realized the fact that no other
processing industry, not even gargantuan petroleum processing industry handles
so much volume in comparison with waste water processing plants.
And the fun fact is waste water processing plants are indeed the
living super organism which work day and night in processing the waste that the
city generates. If city were a humongous animal then waste water treatments
plants are like liver which handles the key aspect of sustaining life
processes. Just like how if liver fails, the body goes through multiple organ
failure , the same happens in city when a waste water treatment plant fails.
Waste water treatment systems is indeed a functional ecosystem like
a forest for it supports diverse living organisms from prokaryotes to
eukaryotes of varying complexities. The pollutants in the incoming waste water
support the ecosystem and there arises the competition for the limited
resources due to the varying life-cycles of microorganisms. Waste water
treatment systems are indeed complex systems for they have microorganisms which
contribute non-linearity behavior to the system coupled with the cyclic
variation in influent flow and composition due to the cyclic behavior of human
beings. In addition to that the systems face major disturbances during climatic
events like rain and storm where they disrupt the system with massive hydraulic
shocks.
In India and around the world, especially in third world
countries, there is a prevailing low efficiency in biological treatment plants
partly due to the above mentioned problems and due to the need for trained man
power. The efficiency problem is usually attributed to plants not working in
design conditions, lack of maintenance, sudden spurt or reduction of human
activity in the catchment area and increases in extreme weather events. When we
take an example of India, according to the report by Central Pollution Control
Board only 13.5 % of the sewage generated in urban areas is treated as
construction of plants is capital intensive. In addition to that treated water
of nearly 39 % of the existing plants doesn't conform to the prescribed
standards under the Environmental (Protection) Rules for discharge into
streams.
In case of River Ganga, Ganga Action Plan was initiated to save
the river from untreated effluent, with 80 % of it originating from households.
Though STPs (Sewage Treatment Plants) were built along the river, they face disruption
due to power shortages, wide variation in temperature with 49 degree Celsius in
summer, 5 degree Celsius in winter and torrential rains during monsoon season
which causes the plant to overflow.
So this shows the need for development of sustainable solutions
to tackle this problem and also throws light on an important problem of whether
the inefficiency of sewage treatment plants is purely an engineering problem or
does it have an ecological paradigm that has gone unanswered, for sewage plant
supports multitude of micro-organisms. Here, I would like to compare waste
water treatment plant to a forest which supports organisms and does it with
minimal human intervention. So here, I want to study on whether a waste water
treatment plant can function with minimal human intervention and is there any
missing links in the ecosystem of built environment which makes it fragile and
reduces its robustness.
So this study would include analysis of microbial ecology of the
built environment, identifying the appropriate consortium of microorganisms for
specific operational conditions and study of functioning of an existing waste
water plant like the Beckton Waste water treatment plant in East London which
is actually the biggest plant in Europe as developing nations needs these
solutions to meet the UN Millennium Development Goals to improve the livability
in the emerging Mega Cities.
Understanding microbial ecology of waste water plants plays a
major role in devising control strategies for the waste water treatment plants
which are inherently extremely complex systems. With land and water becoming a
scarce resource, there arises the need to develop modular, robust and efficient
systems to treat the increasing volumes of waste water and to tackle the
extreme weather events which wreak havoc in Mega cities around the world. To
develop such systems, understanding the inner workings of the ecosystem in
built environment like waste water plant is very important.
The significance of such systems cannot be trivialized, for the
solutions that is developed here can create huge impact in two third of the
world population living in developing world which has massive gaps in terms of
sewage generated and sewage treated.
I would like to study waste water treatment plants and their
resilience to extreme weather events through a doctoral program under Hydro Nations program ( Centre of
Expertise for Waters ) in Scotland , for they have an accumulated experience in
dealing with waste water infrastructure. Of course, what other place would a
person want to go in order to study about Water infrastructure than United
Kingdom which had been a pioneer in creating such infrastructure around the
world including India.
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