A B S T R A C TFood and beverage industry is one of the major contributors to the growth of all economies. In European Union, it constitutes the largest manufacturing sector in terms of turnover, value added, and employment. However, the sector has been associated with various environmental issues including high levels of water consumption and wastewater production. In the present work, an overview regarding the production process, the water usage and the wastewater generation, and treatment of representative manufacturing industries from selected sectors of the food and beverage industry, is presented. The industries under investigation are: slaughterhouses, potato processing, olive oil production, cheese production, and beer manufacturing. As expected, between those different sectors, water consumption and wastewater generation vary greatly. Wastewater pollution load depends on the type of product being processed, the process and the equipment used, while the common characteristic is the strong organic content. In this view, the predominant treatment methods found in the recent literature are biological. This fact is reflected to the wastewater treatment technology employed which, in most of the cases, is biological with special attention to the application of the anaerobic digestion process.

Glancing Angle X-ray Diffraction (GAXRD) is introduced as a direct, non-destructive, surface-sensitive technique for analysis of thin films. The method was applied to polycrystalline thin films (namely, titanium oxide, zinc selenide, cadmium selenide and combinations thereof) obtained by electrochemical growth, in order to determine the composition of ultra-thin surface layers, to estimate film thickness, and perform depth profiling of multilayered heterostructures. The experimental data are treated on the basis of a simple absorption-diffraction model involving the glancing angle of X-ray incidence.

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