Core: Pollution Prevention and Control
Department of Environmental Resources
Pollution prevention and control is a growth market due to the rapidly increasing volumes of waste and wastewater being produced, and tougher legislation being introduced worldwide. The main challenges lie in developing regions, where there is poor coverage of effective and reliable wastewater and sanitation systems. Considering the cost and (lack of) rationale of systems developed in the industrialized countries, there is an increasing need for reorientation, focusing on new concepts, process optimization, waste reduction and resource recovery.
The Pollution Prevention and Control (PPC) core group focuses on the development of rational approaches to sustainable waste management via cleaner production, appropriate waste treatment and resource recovery in both the water supply and sanitation, and the industrial sectors:
- Cleaner production: preventing the generation of waste through the selection of appropriate processes and resource materials, production efficiency enhancements, and encouraging in-plant recycling/reuse/recovery and reutilization of reusable waste materials;
- Waste treatment and reuse: studying and developing ‘ecological engineering’ solutions aimed at balancing water, material and energy flows on a local scale – i.e. at the industry, household, municipality or catchment levels;
- Modelling of biological processes: studying carbon and nutrient removal in domestic and industrial wastewater treatment systems;
- Wastewater management strategies and approaches: critically evaluating existing practices and technologies with a view to proposing new, more sustainable concepts or new areas of application.
Activities
The activities of the PPC core group include postgraduate education, development projects, advisory services and research. The group contributes to the MSc programmes in Sanitary Engineering and in Environmental Science and Technology in the following areas:
- proper resource management, with an emphasis on the tools for analyzing (industrial) processes and deciding on actions to improve process efficiency;
- anaerobic wastewater treatment;
- natural systems for the treatment of domestic wastewater and for resource recovery;
- new approaches to urban waste management, based on reducing water use and improving waste management at the local scale; and
- modelling of waste treatment systems, with an emphasis on the activated sludge process.
The core group contributes to capacity building projects in a number of countries, including Colombia, Egypt, Ghana, Palestine and Zimbabwe.
Research in the PPC core group focuses on three related lines:
- Natural systems for the treatment of, and resource recovery from, domestic wastewater, with an emphasis on nutrient cycles and related biological processes;
- Industrial process analysis, using life cycle analysis, in the area of water and wastewater treatment; and
- Modelling of nutrient removal in activated sludge systems for domestic as well as industrial wastewater treatment.
Most research projects are implemented in collaboration with partner institutions in developing countries.