News

We are thilled to annouce that the book titled " Water Reuse and Unconventional Water Resources: A Multidisciplinary Perspective", contributed, under the umbrella of the Cyclolive Project, by Maria Concetta Bruzzoniti, Luca Rivoira (UniTO, P3) and Massimo del Bubba (UniFI, P2) has been published by SPRINGER Editor.

The book is available at: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-67739-7?sap-outbound-id=D93388060638DDA39D6A6FAC344557840D4D947E

This book covers the latest technologies and challenges for water reuse and unconventional water resources. It presents a comprehensive overview of water reuse as a key approach toward a sustainable solution, and it offers an important multidisciplinary perspective.

The following chapter were authored by the UniTo and UniFI Cyclolive partners:

• Limits and Perspectives of Established Technologies for UrbanWastewater Depuration, by Maria Concetta Bruzzoniti, Luca Rivoira, Simion Mihail Beldean Galea, Donatella Fibbi, and Massimo Del Bubba.
  ABSTRACT: After more than thirty years, the Directive 91/271/EEC on urban wastewater is currently under revision. In the new directive, the clear specification of the concept of domestic wastewater, with inclusion in this category of sewages from human excretions alone, reflects the particular attention recently paid to the pollution of anthropic origin, mainly accounted for by contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) such as pharmaceutical compounds and personal care products. To this aim, by explicitly introducing the term “quaternary treatment”, the new directive intends to emphasize the need to remove a broad spectrum of micropollutants from urban wastewater through specific treatment processes, which indeed are not currently routinely integrated into wastewater treatment plants, unless in the presence of peculiar pollution from industrial activity.This chapter gives an insight into the established technologies for urban wastewater depuration, evaluates their performance towards CEC removal, and highlights critical situations, such as the increased concentrations of some CECs along the treatment chain. To this purpose, more than one thousand CEC removal data in articles published since 2000, identified through Google Scholar and Scopus databases,were reviewed. The data covered various geographical regions, to consider the different technologies used in several countries, according to specific conditions of technological development and financial resources. Technologies used as secondary, tertiary, and quaternary treatment stages of urban wastewater were considered, highlighting, where possible, the specific contributions of each treatment to the overall removal. The heterogeneity in the removal data presentation (i.e. the aggregation of classes of CECs, rather than individual CEC, the grouping of removal efficiencywithin the same technology) prevented, in many cases, a complete interpretation of data. Nevertheless, careful extraction of removal data for selected CECs from the reviewed literature allowed us to gather information on the efficiency of secondary and tertiary/quaternary treatments through a meta-analysis approach, which is not biased by the high level of data heterogeneity. Our analysis suggests higher removal efficiency of combined anaerobic-anoxic–oxic stages towards CECs and a statistically significant impact of disinfection/oxidation process.
   

• Treated Wastewater for Reuse in Irrigation Practices in Agriculture, by Luca Rivoira and Maria Concetta Bruzzoniti.
  ABSTRACT: The reuse of treated wastewater in agriculture is a response to the global challenge ofwater scarcity exacerbated by climate change, population growth, and, in some cases, inefficient water management. This chapter, delving into the regulatory landscape, presents a comprehensive and comparative analysis of the (i) wastewater reuse standards across countries and international bodies; (ii) treatment technologies essential for transforming wastewater into safe irrigation resources; (iii) the potential impact of the treated wastewater reuse on human health through risk assessment; and (iv) the educational initiatives promoting societal acceptance and understanding of water reuse practices. Through the review of real case approaches, the text critically underscores the importance of treatedwastewater reuse in agriculture as a sustainable solution to global water scarcity, discussing all the technical and social practices that ensure the safe, efficient, and socially acceptable implementation of this approach in agriculture practices.