Olive mill wastewaters (OMWs) are mostly characterized by their high-organic content and complex organic compounds in addition to the phenolic compounds. European olive oil manufacturers have to cope up with the same wastewater treatment problem and the applied conventional treatment technologies for OMW were not proved to be very successful in each case. Olive mills are mostly small and medium-sized installations and OMW is generated during the three-four-month-long manufacturing season. The problem is not only the complex wastewater to be treated but also the scattered positioning of the olive mills, the seasonal wastewater generation and the size of the manufacturing facilities. The aim of the study is to identify the organic content of OMW and to assess the biological and chemical treatability of OMWs, in order to assist the development of integrated chemical-biological treatment schemes for best appropriate techniques implementation. The experimental studies show that separation of the particulate fraction improved the biodegradability or reduced the refractory and inhibitory effects of particulate organics.
Micropollutants such as endocrine disruptors are one of the most important group of chemicals polluting water resources. Conventional treatment systems may not be effective for the removal of endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), and the fate of these chemicals should be carefully monitored in the effluent of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). Additional treatment methods such as advanced oxidation processes can be used for the removal of endocrine disruptors. This study presents the existence of endocrine disruptors in 4 different effluents; (i) municipal WWTP effluent, (ii) textile industry WWTP effluent, (iii) organized industrial zone (OIZ) WWTP effluent and (iv) pharmaceutical industry discharge and also presents their removal efficiencies by ozonation and peroxone oxidation. A broad spectrum of removal efficiencies was observed for the EDCs present in the samples since the oxidation efficiency of wastewaters containing EDCs mainly depends on the wastewater matrix and on the type of the EDCs. Ozonation was found to be a low-cost option than peroxone oxidation at the investigated conditions.
The study is a follow-up on rubric-based assessment of level of attainment of Student Outcomes (SOs) in Environmental Engineering undergraduate education by the senior-year Graduation Design Project (GDP): the focal points are the process of and results from incorporation of additional assessment tools and implementation of “Performance Indicator (PI)-breakdown” approach to continue improving the SO Assessment and Evaluation (A&E) process. For several consecutive cycles, A&E to define attainment level of total of seven SOs by the GDP gave results below the set thresholds for some of them (SO1,5,8), which indicated a discrepancy and a need for improvement not only in the assessment tools, but also in the A&E processes. Accordingly, two remedial actions were undertaken to meet those needs and the SOs were re-assessed. As the first remedial action, alternative assessment tools were incorporated to the SO A&E process. Assessment results revealed a clear progress in SO attainment, from 2014-15 to 2015-16. However, those lump-sum results still gave a general sense of students’ performance at SO-level. Therefore, some additional assessment tools were added and the “PI-breakdown”-based approach was implemented as the second remedial action. Those implementations enabled obtaining more realistic, detailed, and in-formative results and facilitated further fine tuning of the SO A&E process.
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