EVAPORATION PHENOMENON AS A WASTE MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGY

The problems concerned with waste management abound in most regions of the world, and so, efforts must be made to assess the global level of pollution and to understand the major factors involved in order to pr opose efficient waste treatment technologies. This must be compatible with environmental and economic conditions and appropriate to semi-urb an settlements, isolated communities and a variety of industrial situa tions. The main purpose of this paper is to present recent waste manag ement technology as an alternative solution to traditional treatment s ystems in regions where those systems are not economically or technica lly Feasible, using for this purpose the advantages of climatic condit ions (air temperature, relative humidity and wind speed). This integra ted technology combines two different processes: optimization of the s olid/liquid separation, using a decanter, followed by the utilization of evaporation panels to eliminate the liquid fraction of the effluent , optimizing by this way the evaporation phenomenon, which is so impor tant and resolute in certain cases, that it is absurd not to exploit i t intensely. The technology presented was followed by a research progr amme developed in the last three years, implemented in an agro-industr ial unit located in a high polluted area of Portugal, with the aim to evaluate its efficiency and optimize the performance parameters. The c onclusions of this research programme emphasized the importance of the evaporation phenomenon as a simple solution to deal with complex envi ronmental problems. Copyright (C) 1996 IAWQ. Published by Elsevier Sci ence Ltd.