I. KHOUNI
"Membrane Technologies for Industrial Effluents Valorization : Water Treatment to Reuse and Added-value Resources Recovery"
The agri food industry uses substantial amount of water to achieve the production process, especially for the maintenance of hygiene and cleanliness conditions. With this, is generating considerable amount of wastewater requiring treatment to meet the discharge standards before discarded! On the other hand, with the shortage of water resources and charging for water use, minimizing water consumption in agri food industries is of paramount importance to maintain its market competitiveness. In this sense, there has been increasing interest in the reuse of treated wastewater, in order to decrease the good water consumption by processes that do not require such high quality feature.
At present, membrane separation processes are arising commercially as industrial solutions and highlighted as novel, eco-friendly and low-cost technologies for water treatment to reuse that can meet the demand of various industrial processes and for resource recovery and valorization following circular economy frameworks.
Thus, resources such as oil, protein, lactose, fat, energy, or other added-value products/resources can be recovered from wastewater by any kind of membrane technology (microfiltration, ultrafiltration, nanofiltration, reverse osmosis, membrane distillation, forward osmosis, etc.) or using a combination of two or more membrane technologies in an integration process. Then, this recovered product or products could be valorized and used in the same treatment process, in another process of the same industry or in another industrial field closing a circular economy loop