Wastewater tertiary treatment options to match reuse standards in agriculture

摘要

In Italy, the restrictive approach for reclaimed water (RW) use in agriculture has led to some difficulties in spreading this practice. In particular, matching microbiological standards, evaluated in terms of Escherichia coli, is quite prohibitive and highly intensive disinfection systems are the sole option to adequately treat municipal wastewater. A different view of the same concern is offered by the World Health Organization (WHO) that proposed a pragmatic approach, based on microbial risk assessment, to evaluate case by case the pathogen reduction in case of RW use in agriculture and how to achieve this.