Sequential Treatment of Municipal Wastewater and Valorization of Filtering Media

Abstract

Despite the wide availability of water in communities, sufficient water supply remains a major challenge in developing contries. Most human activities, such as agro-industrial activities require enormous amounts of water. Unfortunately at the tail end of such activities, large volumes of wastewater containing various pollutants are released into the environment leading to its degradation. This work aims to provide sustainable use of agro wastewater use in the city of Yaounde. With a source of low cost agricultural waste available, corn cobs, this work proposes the development of a sequential filtrating system for municipal wastewater treatment. A treatment process has been designed to recover C, N, P and to remove hazardous microorganisms in the wastewater. With pollutant removal efficiencies between 51 and 95%, the proposed system allows the production of a water effluent readily to be used in agriculture, while the waste filtering materials can be converted to compost and further used for biofarming.