Can Innovative Technologies Provide Benefits to Municipal Water Resource Recovery Facilities

For a new water resource recovery facility (WRRF), or when facing a major upgrade or expansion, utilities have a unique opportunity to evaluate their existing technologies and consider the benefits of more innovative treatment processes. These processes, proven at full scale over the last decade or more, include step-feed activated sludge (SFAS), integrated fixed-film activated sludge (IFAS), membrane bioreactor (MBR), biologically active filtration (BAF), ballasted activated sludge (BAS), and granular activated sludge (GAS).This paper reviews these innovative processes and summarizes three technology evaluations, in which innovative treatment technologies are compared with conventional activated sludge (CAS) serving as a baseline in each evaluation. The study found that while innovative processes are more cost effective when limited space is available or high quality effluent is required, conventional processes are more cost effective in the evaluated WRRFs, where neither of these constraints applied. The exception was GAS, which shows the potential to become a dominant technology in the future.