“Wastewater treatment technologies, waste-to-energy systems, and wastewater nutrient recovery plants are widening the scope of innovation for technology providers. For instance, nutrient recovery from wastewater will boost the sale of fertilisers, which may, in turn, establish a steady revenue stream for wastewater treatment plant operators,” observed Frost & Sullivan TechVision Research Analyst Sharath Thirumalai. “Similarly, E&S stakeholders are promoting the use of precision agriculture and micro irrigation techniques to generate economic and environmental benefits for technology adopters.”
“E&S innovators are enhancing the efficiency of advanced oxidation processes and wastewater treatment technologies by employing a combination of equipment that can reduce the number of processes in each technology,” noted Frost & Sullivan TechVision Research Analyst Shrinivas Chandrakant Tukdeo. “They are also striving to develop systems that lower the energy consumption in all technologies and, thereby, be more economically and environmentally viable.”
However, high CAPEX and OPEX of top technologies such as advanced oxidation processes and wastewater membrane filtration, and the general lack of end-user awareness, will restrain their adoption rates, even in urban areas. These issues can be mitigated to a large extent by public-private partnerships between governments and non-governmental organisations of developing countries to educate end users in rural and semi-urban areas about the importance of the technologies in creating a sustainable environment.
Besides, with more innovations, there will be a substantial reduction in the CAPEX and OPEX of E&S technologies. In the future, R&D of brine management and other wastewater resource recovery solutions will be given more importance so that complete commercialisation of these technologies will be possible, even in developing nations.
