The US National Research Council recently recommended direct potable water reuse (DPR), or potable water reuse without environmental buffer, for consideration to address US water demand. However, conveyance of wastewater and water to and from centralized treatment plants consumes on average four times the energy of treatment in the USA, and centralized DPR would further require upgradient distribution of treated water. Therefore, information on the cost of unit treatment processes potentially useful for DPR versus system capacity was reviewed, converted to constant 2012 US dollars, and synthesized in this work. A logarithmic variant of the Williams Law cost function was found applicable over orders of magnitude of system capacity, for the subject processes: activated sludge, membrane bioreactor, coagulation/flocculation, reverse osmosis, ultrafiltration, peroxone and granular activated carbon. Results are demonstrated versus 10 DPR case studies. Because economies of scale found for capital equipment are counterbalanced by distribution/collection network costs, further study of the optimal scale of distributed DPR systems is suggested.
Cationic metal and radionuclide contaminants can be extracted from soils to groundwater with sequestering agents such as EDTA. However, EDTA must then be removed fromthe groundwater, by advanced oxidation or specialized biological treatment. In this work, aqueous individual metal-EDTA solutions were aerated with steel wool for 25 h, at ambient pH, temperature, and pressure. Removal of approximately 99% of EDTA (0.09-1.78 mM); glyoxylic acid (0.153 mM); chelated Cd2+ (0.94 and 0.0952 mM), Pb2+ (0.0502 mM), and Hg2+ (0.0419 mM); and free chromate and vanadate was shown. EDTA was oxidized to glyoxylic acid and formaldehyde, and metals/metalloids were coprecipitated together with iron oxyhydroxide floc. Free arsenite and arsenate were each removed at 99.97%. Free Sr2+, and chelated Ni2+ were removed at 92% and 63%, respectively. Similar removals were obtained from mixtures, including 99.996+/-0.004% removal of total arsenic (95% confidence). Traces of iminodiacetic acid, nitrilotriacetic acid, and ethylenediaminetriacetic acid were detected after 25 h. Results are consistent with first-order, solution-phase oxidation of EDTA and glyoxylic acid by ferryl ion and H202, respectively, with inhibition due to sludge accumulation, and equilibrium metal coprecipitation. This ambient process, to our knowledge previously unknown, agrees with recently reported findings and shows promise for remediation of metals, metalloids, and radionuclides in wastewater, soil, and sediment.
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