The invisible BNR plant provides high quality effluent and recreational area for densely populated urban area

Abstract

In a densely populated area, a large wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) has been constructed in the underground. The plant is practically “invisible” to visitors and neighbours, and the ground level is used as a park and sport facilities in order to avoid the “not in my backyard” phenomenon. The WWTP has a 5-stage biological nutrient removal system utilizing the denitrifying PAO (dPAO) with a step feed in order to treat the weak sewage with higher nutrient removal requirement. Although the underground installation could be expected to increase plant operating temperature, the temperature increase was only 1°C. The polished final effluent from a sand filter produced average TN and TP concentrations of 5.11 mg/L and 0.91 mg/L, respectively with SS concentrations of 0.61 mg/L, indicating that the dPAO system combined with sand filter effectively produced a high quality effluent.