Non-conventional treatment of treated municipal wastewater for reverse osmosis

High-quality potable water can be produced at a reasonable cost if reverse osmosis (RO) technology is applied to renovate secondary/tertiary urban wastewater effluent. Such implementation would yield many advantages to Kuwait, namely: satisfying the increasing agricultural, industrial and domestic demands for good quality water that is free from viruses and bacteria and other microbials present preserving the natural strategic water resources; reducing the environmental pollution resulting from the direct discharge of secondary/tertiary municipal effluents to the sea; and meeting unexpected emergency cases of shortages in freshwater produced from the desalination of seawater for certain domestic applications. The main aims of this work are to assess the technical viability and the economic feasibility of implementing RO technology to renovate Kuwaiti wastewater treated effluent. The paper describes the design of pretreatment, experimental set-up, results, and data analysis of desalinating municipal wastewater by RO. The results indicate that wastewater can be treated to produce an excellent permeate quality almost devoid from salts and pollutants.