Domestic Wastewater Treatment in Developing Countries

This book is primarily written for final year undergraduate civil engineering students in developing country universities, for post-graduate masters students in environmental, public health and sanitary engineering, and for practising engineers working in developing countries or working on wastewater treatment projects in these countries. The primary emphasis of the book is on low-cost, high-performance, sustainable domestic wastewater treatment systems. Most of the systems described are ‘natural’ systems – so called because they do not require any electromechanical power input. The secondary emphasis is on wastewater re-use in agriculture and aquaculture – after all, it is better to use the treated wastewater productively and therefore profitably, rather than simply discharge it into a river and thus waste its water and its nutrients. The human health aspects of wastewater use are obviously important and these are covered in detail, including an introduction to quantitative microbial risk analysis.