Thiruvananthapuram: A significant breakthrough has been achieved by a national institute here, which has successfully developed and patented a sustainable technology for treating and disposing of organic wastewater produced by hotels, restaurants, catering units, and similar establishments.

This innovation addresses a critical issue in places lacking adequate sewerage infrastructure.

"As a sustainable solution, the on-site wastewater technology, named NOWA, developed by CSIR-National Institute for Interdisciplinary Science and Technology (CSIR-NIIST), has the advantage of recovering valuable resources like reuse quality water, bio-energy and organic manure and soil conditioner from the wastewater", an official statement said here.

The technology (WO 2022/130402 A1) was developed by a team of scientists led by Krishnakumar B, Senior Principal Scientist in the Environmental Technology Division of NIIST, Thiruvananthapuram, it said.

Unlike the common wastewater treatment technologies such as the Moving Bed Biofilm Reactor (MBBR), Sequence Bioreactor (SBR) and Electrocoagulation, this technology has many added advantages such as less space requirement, less operational cost and capacity to treat high-strength wastewater without problems from frequent sludge disposal, the statement said.

"This technology is a combined anaerobic-aerobic bioprocess with sludge handling and disinfection modules attached. Nearly 70-80 per cent of the inlet organic contaminant is recovered as biogas in the anaerobic process unit. The residual organics and nutrients are removed in the subsequent aerobic process unit. A 10 KLD wastewater treating NOWA unit will occupy less than 18 sq meters", it said.

This comes as a boon for small and medium-scale businesses as even small restaurants now spend up to Rs 50,000 per month on disposing of wastewater.

This technology has been approved by the Kerala State Suchitwa Mission, and four companies have already licensed it non-exclusively and field units are working at different industrial sites.

CSIR-NIIST recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Kochi-based Two-degree Climate Control Pvt Ltd for the commercial transfer of the technology making this the fifth technology transfer for NOWA.

CSIR-NIIST Director C Anandharamakrishnan said NIIST is looking forward to more start-ups and private companies partnering with NIIST in their highly diverse and interdisciplinary research activities so that the outcome of R&D activities at NIIST can be translated to the field to address real problems of the society. 

PTI