CTB3365x – Introduction to Water Treatment

D1a - Urban Water Cycle/Sanitary engineering

Luuk Rietveld

What do we know from the Urban Water cycle? How do

drinking water supply, wastewater discharge and treatment,
and the groundwater and surface water systems interact?
Welcome to “Introduction to Water Treatment”, my name is
Luuk Rietveld, professor in Drinking water and Urban Water
cycle Technology.

After this lecture you will be able to understand the key

elements of the urban water cycle; the global drivers for urban
water management as well as the importance of water reuse
within the urban environment.

The Urban Water Cycle consists of technologies needed for

drinking water intake, treatment and distribution as well as
wastewater collection, treatment and discharge. To produce
drinking water, water is extracted from the underground, so
called groundwater, or from rivers or lakes, the surface water.
This source water isn’t drinkable and must be treated. The
treatment plant consists of different processes depending on
the quality of the source and the requirements for drinking
water. Afterwards, the water is transported to the city and
distributed via a piped network to households, commercial
buildings, public entities and small industries. After usage the
water is collected in a sewer system and transported to a
wastewater treatment plant where the water quality is
improved for discharge into the receiving water bodies. These
surface waters can then, again, be used as a source for
drinking water production.

What was the main driver for developing the Urban Water
Cycle? The centralised sanitation service finds its origin after
the Cholera outbreak in London during 1849, when John Snow
discovered that there was a clear relationship between Cholera
and the use of a contaminated water well. He proved his theory
by removing the pump handle from the well which resulted in a
dramatic reduction of the spread of the cholera epidemic.
Another example of the benefit of centralised drinking water
supply is the number of people dying from Typhoid Fever in the
Netherlands. This number decreased drastically with increasing
number of people connected to the centralised drinking water
supply system. In the 70ies almost all people were connected
and no outbreaks were found anymore.

Do we all have sufficient drinking water? While in countries like

the Netherlands, the water problems are more or less solved,
world-wide there is a mountain to climb. In many countries in
the world water scarcity is a problem. This can be due to
physical causes, such as the reduced amount of rainfall,
recharging the groundwater aquifers and the rivers; or due to
economic factors, meaning that there is no financial capacity to
construct and maintain adequate water supply systems.
Water scarcity leads to water stress, meaning that the demand
for safe drinking water is higher than the availability of water
resources with sufficient capacity. Water stress can result in
insufficient supply, causing unmet water demands or over-
extraction, leading to the depletion of groundwater and surface
water resources.

In the meantime water demand is increasing. With increasing

population, urbanisation and industrialisation, more water has
to be supplied to cities. These growing demands and
demographic changes are also impacting the drainage system
and the pollution of the urban environment.

The growing water demand requires greater capacity from

water sources. These water sources are mostly not found in the
vicinities of cities. A clear example is the water supply for
Johannesburg and Pretoria which sources their water from the
Vaal dam.

The Lesotho Highlands project , approximately 500km away,

entails several dams and tunnels in the mountains, to enforce
the Vaal river and Vaal dam in order to secure the water supply
to this urbanised area.

Water scarcity isn’t only a quantity issue, but also a quality one.
When sources are too polluted to be a reliable source, water
availability is under stress. Therefore, major efforts are made
to improve the surface water quality. In the past the main
focus was to remove organic matter from the wastewater,
but more recently advanced nutrient removal is applied to
avoid eutrophication of the receiving water bodies. Future
emphasis will be laid on the removal of Endocrine disrupting
compounds

such as pesticides and pharmaceuticals to avoid the

accumulation of persistent organics in the environment.

With the increased efforts in wastewater treatment, the

effluent of the wastewater treatment plant sometimes obtains a
better quality than the receiving water bodies. In these cases,
the question arises whether the effluent isn’t a better source
for drinking and industrial water supply than some surface
water bodies.

Several examples exist. The most famous one is in Windhoek,

Namibia, where about 25% of the domestic water supply
consists of reclaimed wastewater. The effluent of the
wastewater treatment plant is extensively treated with ozone,
coagulation, flotation, activated carbon filtration, membrane
filtration and chlorination. The product can compete with the
water obtained from the original source about 300 km away
from the city.
Another example is the water supply for Dow Chemical in
Terneuzen.

The industrial water supply is fed by the wastewater treatment

plant of the city of Terneuzen.

It appears to be more economical to treat the effluent than to

desalinate the salt water flowing in front of the industrial area.
In this way the urban water cycle is closed.
Thank you for your attention and I hope to see you again for
the next lecture on “the design aspects of drinking water
treatment”!