Low technology systems for wastewater treatment: perspectives.

Low technology systems for the treatment of wastewater are sometimes presented as remnants of the past, nowadays supposedly only meant to serve developing countries and remote rural areas. However, considering their advantages and disadvantages together with enhanced treatment requirements and recent research and technological developments, the future of these systems still appears promising. Successful applications of low technology systems require that more care is taken of their design and operation than often observed. Correlatively, more efforts should be made to decipher the treatment mechanisms and determine the related reaction parameters, so as to provide more deterministic approaches of the natural wastewater treatment systems and better predict their performance.