Toward achieving sustainable management of municipal wastewater sludge in Egypt

Toward achieving sustainable management of municipal wastewater sludge in Egypt: The current status and future prospective

Wahaab, Rifaat Abdel (Holding Company for Water and Wastewater)
Mahmoud, Mohamed (National Research Centre)
van Lier, J.B. (TU Delft Sanitary Engineering)

2020

Over the past 4 decades, the increasing amounts of excess sludge from municipal wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) represent a challenge toward achieving the sustainability of the drinking water and sanitation sector in Egypt, resulting in a serious environmental pollution due to the uncontrolled use of non-stabilized sludge. Here, we report a comprehensive overview on the current situation of excess sludge production, management, and disposal in Egypt. Owing to the technologies used for wastewater treatment in Egypt that mainly consist of activated sludge based-technologies, about 2.1 million tons of dry solids is produced annually. The majority of WWTPs in Egypt lack proper sludge stabilization facilities, except for the WWTPs in high living standards governorates (e.g., Cairo, Alexandria, and Giza). Therefore, about 85% of the non-stabilized sludge is improperly disposed and directly used for agricultural purposes. Despite the importance of managing the use of non- and/or partially-treated sludge, especially for agricultural purposes, the national legislations for sludge disposal/reuse in Egypt are incomplete and, in practice, they are not reinforced. In order to evaluate the most sustainable scenario for sludge management in Egypt, a qualitative decision-support system (DSS) was used. The DSS framework was refined and estimated, based on several evaluating categories, and used to guide the decision process towards achieving sustainable management of municipal wastewater sludge in Egypt. The results reveals that “sludge-to-energy” through anaerobic digestion is the most sustainable scenario for sludge disposal and management in Egypt. The anaerobic digestion-based technology seems to offer advantages of interest at affordable costs, such as the production of renewable energy, stabilized soil conditioners, and fertilizers for agricultural purposes.

Agriculture
Anaerobic digestion
Egypt
Municipal wastewater sludge
Proper disposal and management
Resource recovery
Sanitation

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:9093c522-e0fe-483e-b3f7-c014af5cd5a8

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2020.109880

2020-11-06

1364-0321

Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews, 127

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2020 Rifaat Abdel Wahaab, Mohamed Mahmoud, J.B. van Lier