Establishment of Effluent Standards for Industrial Wastewaters in Korea: Current Issues and Suggestions for Future Plan

Abstract

Industrial wastewaters have been strongly controlled by effluent standard. Either water quality-based or technology-based effluent standard could be adopted on the basis of the scientific rationale. Since it is important to set the regulation acceptable to both of environmentalist and developmentalist, reasonable background in areal classification and industrial categorization is required as well as scientific background. This study focused on Korean effluent standards from the past to the future covering how to set the regulation based on the approaches employed in well-developed countries. Except the area where strong protection is required, the regulation should be applied according to the type of discharge, that is, direct or indirect discharge. Industrial categorization should be carried out with the collection of wastewater data to reflect the characteristics of wastewater in the regulation. As a way of improving the allowable level of pollutant discharged, it was proposed that conventional pollutants to follow technology-based standard, whereas toxic pollutants would be appropriate to water quality-based standard. The lognormal distribution based on the effluent concentration data was considered to be reasonable for the regulation of conventional pollutants. The water quality standard implying risk assessment with 10 times dilution ratio was used to derive toxic pollutant standards.

Determining Discharge Characteristics and Limits of Heavy Metals and Metalloids for Wastewater Treatment Plants (WWTPs) in China Based on Statistical Methods

“…This distribution was also verified while using the P-P graph test (Figures 4 and 5) with the fitting lines of cumulative probability of monitoring data after logarithmic transformation against the expected cumulative probability. The lognormal distribution of effluent concentrations is also consistent with other research [7,33]. When considering some of the undetected data, the delta-lognormal distribution provides a reasonable and practical basis for further analysis of the heavy metal and metalloid data and determining the discharge limits, which is in accordance with the EPA regulations [11,25,34].…”

Occurrence of Pharmaceutically Active Compounds and Potential Ecological Risks in Wastewater from Hospitals and Receiving Waters in Sri Lanka

“…Because reliable data are not available for Sri Lanka, a 10‐fold factor of the mean of measured environmental concentration (MEC mean ) was designated as the PEC to estimate the RQ in the present study. A 10‐fold dilution ratio is set in some countries for certain pollutants in the effluents to maintain environmental quality standards (Hashimoto, 2020; Kim et al, 2010). …”

Municipal Wastewater Treatment in Iran: Current Situation, Barriers and Future Policies

“…It is an effort to obtain clean and safe water and a desire to achieve an economically developed society. 54 On the other hand, due to increasing public awareness and concerns about water issues, and enforcement of environmental legislation in Iran, wastewater treatment plants must enhance the rate of removal of pollutants. Here, it is stated that the percentage of the population covered by wastewater facilities in urban and rural areas should reach 90% and 15%, respectively, by 2040.…”