Industrial wastewater treatment within the "design space" scientific framework

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The research program will develop new detection and treatment technologies for the processing of industrial wastewater (WW) from industrial and commercial facilities (ICFs). The industrial relevance of the work described in the project is overwhelmingly high - the Wastewater Systems Effluent Regulations (WSER), a new set of national effluent quality standards, came into force in July 2015 and will be phased-in with the first compliance deadline (for 'high risk' facilities) set for December 2020. Aevitas, the partner for this research program, operates a specialized treatment facility that receives industrial WW from a network of hundreds of different ICFs. The quality of the received WW varies considerably depending on the original source and thus the partnership with Aevitas gives the McMaster team a unique opportunity to develop new technologies for a wide range of industrial WW types. The research outcomes are anticipated to have significant impact on the entire field of industrial WW treatment including the following:- Developing excellence in the detection, identification, and removal of biocides from industrial WW- Achieving an order of magnitude improvement in effluent quality via removal of organic content and toxic heavy metals- Decreasing operational costs via higher process efficiencies and improved process stabilityThe research program is principally inspired by recent trends in the pharmaceutical industry known as the 'design space' concept, an approach which relies on the development and integration of new technologies whose performance are optimized via high-throughput studies. The proposed research is expected to yield an overall improvement in WW effluent quality which would lead to healthier aquatic ecosystems.