High-rate anaerobic and constructed

wetland systems for municipal and

industrial wastewater
C. A. Arias1, R. Kilian2, D. De la Varga3, M. Soto3, D. Oirschot4, A. Pascual5, L.
Herrero5 and J. A. Alvarez5
1Aarhus University, Aarhus C., Denmark.
2Kilian water, Bryrup, Denmark.
3Humigal, A Corua, Germany.
4Rietland, Minderhout, Belgium

5AIMEN Technology Centre, Pontevedra, Spain. Corresponding author: jaalvarez@aimen.es.

INTRODUCTION
Even though the Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC, concerning urban WW treatment, forces to treat sewage, there are a lot of small and medium size towns without this service. In addition,
many of them cannot deal with energy and maintenance costs of conventional treatment plants making them unsustainable and uneconomic (EC, 2011).
The HIGHWET project, funded recently in FP7-SME-2013 call (Grant Agreement N: 605445), aims to perform and validate new approaches of HCW and VCW including innovative materials as gravel
bed and aeration devices for increasing biological development by implementing hybrid configurations (anaerobic - CW systems) for decreasing required surface of conventional horizontal CWs.
Three European lead-user SMEs will collaborate with two RTD performers to obtain new WW plant configurations based in anaerobic digestion and CW in order to exploit new markets: small towns,
industrial (F&B) and agriculture (livestock farms) sectors. Currently, the towns and companies of these sectors have inefficient and expensive WW treatment systems. In this way, HIGHWET project
has a food sector SME as end-user to validate the performance of this new technology and regional water agencies and local government as stakeholders interested in definition of HIGHWET
systems and final results

OBJECTIVES
Wastewater (WW) treatment of small populations, food and beverage (F&B) companies
and livestock farms is one of the most important problems due to decentralized location,
limited economic resources, and lack of specialized personnel.
The HIGHWET project is addressed to improve the capacity and effectiveness of
constructed wetland (CW) systems as high-rate and sustainable WW treatment system.
Two configurations will be validated.:
1. The first configuration consists of a hybrid micro-aerated hydrolytic anaerobic digester
and Horizontal CW (HCW) system for raw municipal WW treatment,
2. The second configuration consists of a combination of micro-aerated HUSB reactor,
Vertical CW (VCW) and aerated HCW for treatment of high load organic industrial
WW.
These HIGHWET systems will contain an effluent recirculation, air distribution systems
and specific natural material to configure technologies capable of being clear competitive
treatment alternatives to high rate aerobic technologies with complex and expensive
O&M.

HIGHWET Pilot Plants

The overall configurations and their components will maintain the simplicity of construction
and operation of classical anaerobic digesters (lvarez et al., 2008), HCW and VCW units
(Brix and Arias, 2005), but increasing the overall performance of the system through
limited artificial aeration and optionally through effluent recycling. The behaviour of the
configurations in relation to solids accumulation and energy consumption will be
investigated in order to determine its lifetime and general sustainability. Figure 1 and 2
show the schemes for configuration 1 and 2, respectively.
CONFIGURATION 1: HUSB + HCW
Horizontal CW

Biogas

Effluent

CW Influent
Water
flow
excess

Anaerobic
digester
(HUSB)

Recirculation
Aeration
system

Raw
Influent

The global contribution of HIGHWET project to improve the knowledge or technological

process of CWs as WW treatment alternative is to develop holistic configurations
combining hydrolytic anaerobic digester (HUSB) and vertical and horizontal CWs capable
of operating at high loading rate of about 20-50 g BOD/m2d (for the overall system and
according the configuration), thus reducing the land requirements by a factor of 2 to 4
regarding conventional CWs.

Micro-aeration
system

CONFIG. 1: HUSB + HCW

AE - HCW - 0.6 m
AE - HCW - 0.3 m

Raw
influent

HUSB

Effluent

HCW - 0.3 m
AE - 0.6 m - novel material

HIGHWET Innovations
Innovations of HIGHWET systems to the existing technology are related to the following
technological progresses:
1. HUSB provided with micro-aeration. Micro-aeration will be provided in a continuous
and low intensity regime in the upper zone of the HUSB digesters. The integration of
micro-aeration on the same HUSB unit operated for domestic, agriculture and industrial
WW pre-treatment has not been investigated at the moment.
2. HCWs intensified with aeration. Aeration will increase organic load and nitrogen
removal efficiencies. Factors to be investigated are the bed depth and the regime and
intensity of aeration. The effect of bed depth on aeration efficiency (and energy
consumption) and treatment efficiency has not been investigate at the moment in a sideby-side comparison at field scale. HCW units with two different bed depths will be
applied for the same regime and intensity of aeration. Aeration time, spatial aeration and
aeration intensity will be investigated.
3. VCW and HCW with recirculation. The use of a recirculation ratio of the CW effluent to
the inlet will permit to treat high organic loading WW and improve the nitrogen removal
enhancing nitrification and denitrification process.
4. Natural waste material/aggregate as gravel bed in HCWs. The efficiency of a HCW
unit built with a natural waste material with high adsorption capacity as substrate will be
checked in order to enhance phosphorous removal. Besides, material specifications
(size, morphology, granularity, concentration, adsorption capacity, etc.) will be firstly
studied and secondly used as inputs to carry out a proper material implementation in
HIGHWET HCWs.

Figure 1 Schemes of the HIGHWET Configuration 1 for municipal WW treatment. AE: Aerated.

CONFIGURATION 2: HUSB + VCW + HCW

Biogas

Vertical CW

Horizontal CW
Effluent

CW Influent
Water
flow
excess

Anaerobic
digester
(HUSB)

Recirculation

Recirculation
Aeration
system

Raw
Influent

Micro-aeration
system

CONFIG. 2: HUSB + VCW + HCW

Raw
influent

HUSB

VCW

AE - HCW

Effluent

Figure 2 Schemes of the HIGHWET Configuration 2 for industrial WW treatment. AE: Aerated.

CONCLUSIONS
The benefits of HIGHWET systems are detailed as following:

Increase the capacity for treating high organic load WW or high WW flows. This will
permit to treat F&B industrial WW, urban WW of populations from 2,000 up to
10,000 PE and/or livestock farms WW using smaller areas.

References
lvarez, J.A., Ruz, I., Soto, M. (2008). Anaerobic digesters as a pretreatment for constructed wetlands.
Ecol. Eng., 33, 54-67.
Brix, H. and Arias, C.A. (2005). The use of vertical flow constructed wetlands for on-site treatment of
domestic wastewater: New Danish guidelines. Ecol. Eng., 25, 491-500.
EC. (2011). 6th Commission Summary on the Implementation of the Urban Waste Water Treatment
Directive. COMMISSION STAFF WORKING PAPER.

Reduce the required surface making CWs more attractive and suitable for
customers with less available space. In addition, construction costs will be reduced
remarkably.

Increase the removal efficiency of organic and nutrient matter, even the pathogens.

Life time of the CWs will be increased since clogging problems will be delayed.

Acknowledgement
This project has received funding from the European Unions Seventh Framework Programme for research,
technological development and demonstration under grant agreement No 605445

inspiring change

Demonstrable impact advantages to the environment via treating industrial,

livestock and municipal WW which are nowadays are being discharged without or
with an insufficient treatment.

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