Technological Developments

Special Report: Water: An Assessment of the Resource
By Jean-Claude Deutsch, Martine Vullierme
English

Several factors played a role prevailing in the technological development of the domain of the water: the scientific and technical progress generally, the consideration of the consumer, the concerns bound to the environment and the acceptability more and more limited of the risks.
In the field of the drinking water, the urgency makes necessary today to act along two ways: anticipate and treat. In the first way, we find the programs of intervention such Ferti-Mieux, the reconstruction of the natural process of waters through grounds, to treat directly the resource, and to localize and to estimate of best possible the risks of pollution on the catchment basin of the resource. In the second way, important evolutions of the treatment are to be noted: of purely chemical at first, in the biologic today, by way of the physico-chemical the main employed technologies are: the transfer of disinfection at the end of the process, the treatments of refining, the membranes.
In the field of sewerage, the main problem bound to the treatment of waste water is the elimination of sludge. On the other hand, as regards stormwater, important innovations were realized these last years within the framework of three new approaches: the real-time control, the alternative techniques and the management of the risk.
The decision-making is in the heart of a more and more complex context in the field of the management of water.

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