Focus of wastewater management must shift from control to prevention

摘要

The focus of waste management in the chemical industries has largely been on control techniques, and not on prevention, and with tightening of standards and norms, there will be greater challenges for the industry. In particular, standards for wastewater discharged after treatment are being tightened and will go beyond the basic norms that mandate compliance to simple parameters like chemical oxygen demand (COD), biological oxygen demand (BOD), total dissolved solids (TDS), suspended solids (SS) etc. This change will require the industry to harness a slew of modern technologies for management of recalcitrant molecules, as also a shift in approach to waste prevention, rather than waste treatment.