Possibilities for removal of micropollutants in small-scale wastewater treatment - methods and multi-criteria analysis

The quality of worlds’ water resources is facing new challenges, for instance detectable concentration of various trace contaminants under the term micropollutants is discharging into water bodies from both municipal wastewater treatment plants and from on-site wastewater facilities. A project called RedMic aim at identifying and quantifying emissions of micropollutants from on-site wastewater treatments as a basis for providing innovative treatment technologies to reduce potential risks for groundwater and surface water contamination. This thesis work deals with two of the work packages in the RedMic project: a column experiment to test the capability of 10 adsorbents to remove micropollutants and a multi-criteria analysis is conducted to evaluate if a filter composed of granulated activated carbon (GAC) or ozonation can be used for on-site wastewater treatment facilities. Based on the removal efficiency of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) of selected adsorbents, two types of activated carbon reduced up to 90% DOC concentration in the effluents. Moreover, six other adsorbents also showed good removal efficiency with around 60% in the second sampling. However, the data used in this thesis was only from the initial part of the experiment that continued and the final results will be published elsewhere. Two system solutions were evaluated with multi-criteria analysis: sandbed filter with either GAC filtration (1) or with ozonation (2) System solution 1 was found to have advantage compared to system 2