Agricultural wastewater reuse in southern Italy

Within a strategic R&D project, since April 2002, membrane filtration, simplified treatments, storage reservoirs and constructed wetlands technologies are under investigation, at field scale, to evaluate their effectiveness for treating municipal effluents to be reused in agriculture. So far, the main results recorded have been the following: membrane filtration — the microbial quality of treated effluents was higher than that of local well-water used for irrigation; simplified treatment — in order to save the agronomic potential of organic matter and nutrients present in urban wastewater, olive trees were irrigated with effluents produced by skipping biological processes and this resulted in a yield increase of 50%; storage reservoirs — TSS, BOD5, COD and nutrients concentrations achieved the in force Italian limits for WW agricultural reuse; constructed wetlands — recorded average efficiencies for TSS, BOD5, COD, TN and TP removals were 85%, 65%, 75%, 42% and 32% respectively.