Needs-oriented approach for decision support of industrial wastewater management

Abstract

Historically, wastewaters are mostly discharged in rivers and more recently in wastewater treatment plants. These last few years the paradigm shift toward industrial ecology brought up the necessity of matching natural and anthropogenic cycles and so raised the interest for reuse of wastewater as raw material. Thereby, wastewater, depending on its characteristics, can be discharged to different types of receiving media -natural environment (river), urban wastewater treatment plants (WWTP), internal or external industrial units -after being properly processed. Thereby, the characteristics of the discharged water must meet the regulatory requirements. In Europe, two directives deal with this question. The first one, the Industrial Emission Directive (IED) is based on four principles: the integrative pollution prevention, the use of Best Available Techniques (BAT), flexibility, public participation and information access. The second one, the Water Framework Directive (WFD), gives general objectives for maintaining and restoring the European water bodies' quality. The application at the industrial level remains variable. In this context, we explored the possibility of considering the wastewater as a product, via a quality approach, linking the two European directives in an industrial ecology strategy. The thought process questions the possibility to transpose the principles and steps of quality management described in the ISO 9000 norm to industrial wastewater management. One key point of the transposition is the evaluation of the "client's" needs, which is quite easy when the receiving media is an industrial unit, becomes more difficult when it is a WWTP and even more in the case of a river.