To help conserve diminishing water resources and draw on unconventional means for industrial use in the arid province of Khuzestan, an agreement was signed between the National Water and Wastewater Engineering Company of Iran (Abfa) and Shadegan Steel Company on Wednesday, head of the provincial Water and Wastewater Company said.
“The water company will supply 8 million cubic meters of reclaimed water per year to the steelmaker over 25 years,” Mohammad Reza Karaminejad was quotes as saying by ISNA.
The first phase of the Shadegan wastewater plant became operational in July and is expected to help preserve the southern namesake city’s underground water resources and optimize wastewater for farming and industries, Karaminejad said.
“The plant’s expansion plan will start soon and upon completion of the second phase, the facility’s annual processing capacity will reach 10 million cubic meters.”
Construction of four sewage treatment plants in Khorramshahr, Abadan, Bandar Imam Khomeini and Mahshahr [all in Khuzestan Province] has made 60% progress and are scheduled to go on stream in 2023, in which case close to 50 million cubic meters of effluent will be processed in the oil-rich region per annum.
Referring to similar moves in other areas, Karaminejad noted that Abfa and Isfahan Steel Company, Iran's biggest producer of structural steel in Isfahan Province, have concluded a long-term agreement based on which the steel producer will be supplied with at least 125 million cubic meters of recycled sewage for 20 years.
The steel company is expanding wastewater network and plants in Fouladshahr, a district in Lenjan County and Imanshahr in the central district of Falavarjan County.
Do-or-Die
“Water-intensive industries are almost wiping out the limited water resources in most provinces, including Khuzestan, Qom, Yazd and Isfahan, and the need to recycle and reuse wastewater has become a do-or-die issue,” the water official warned.
One effective approach is to build as many wastewater treatment plants as possible to recycle not only industrial but also household sewage.
There are over 220 wastewater treatment plants in Iran and total sewage treatment capacity has surpassed 11 million cubic meters per day.
Of the total 7.5 billion cubic meters of usable water that can be treated in Iran annually, less than 25% is recycled, Abfa statistics show.
While the use of reclaimed wastewater has been recognized as a critical and pragmatic solution to deal with water scarcity across the globe, it is indeed regrettable that in some regions in Iran, including Khomein County in Markazi Province, industrialists and farmers still insist on extracting water from depleting ground resources instead of tapping into unconventional resources.
According to Yousef Erfani Nasab, head of the provincial Water and Wastewater Company, as there is a small market for recycled water, it is poured into rivers, and the odor has made life miserable for residents in and around small towns of the county over the last 10 years.
A paradigm shift is necessary to create and promote an economic system in which wastewater is considered a precious resource rather than a liability, he said.
“Only a fraction of treated wastewater produced in Khomein County’s Wastewater Treatment Plant is used in industries and the rest is dumped into rivers.”
Treatment capacity of Khomein sewage treatment plant is 4.5 million cubic meters a year, of which less than 2 million cubic meters is used by municipalities and industries namely steel, petrochemicals and car factories.
Economic Feasibility
Either industry owners are unaware of the province’s water crisis (water is rationed in villages in summer), or they prefer to tap into (depleting) groundwater that for them seems economically feasible.
According to the official, there is a contract between industries and Khomein’s wastewater treatment plant, but the former are uncommitted to the terms of the deal (apparently because they have access to unauthorized wells).
Markazi Province in western Iran is the country’s fourth biggest industrial hub and a major producer of travertine stones, plants and flowers.
SMEs in the province are located in the industrial cities of Kheyrabad Arak, Delijan, Khomein, Aybakabad, Arak and Shahid Babaei Industrial Zone. Iraq, Turkey and Afghanistan are the main export destinations from this region.
What is more disturbing is that Markazi Province is not the only region where large volumes of treated sewage goes to waste. The same is true in Hormozgan Province where Bandar Abbas Wastewater Treatment Plant siphons a large part of its treated output into the Persian Gulf as there are few buyers.
Globally, economic and environmental pressures have led to the growing use of recycled water, including for irrigation of non-food crops, green spaces, recovering arid land, fire systems, industrial cooling, sanitation and even indirect and possibly direct sources of drinking water in some countries.
