Intelligent management and sewage treatment with minimal environmental impact are growing demands from society, not only for large urban centers, but also for rural areas. With this proposal, researchers from the Faculty of Civil Engineering and Architecture at Unicamp (FEC), in partnership with professionals from the company MarquesParizotto Engenharia, joined forces and developed a compact and modular sewage treatment unit.
Each module of the system developed has the capacity to treat an average of one thousand liters of sewage and, if it is necessary to expand the treatment capacity, there is the possibility of setting up a treatment system integrating more modules.
With a patent requested by the Inova Unicamp Innovation Agency at the National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI), the technology was licensed by the company MarquesParizotto on an exclusive basis and is composed of biofilters connected in parallel, called filter modules, with raw sewage input. and a treated effluent outlet. Biofilters are made up of biomass and worms (earthworms), but Marcelo Mareco, who is an environmental engineer at MarquesParizotto and also the inventor of the technology, explains that the novelty is not about using the vermifiltration technique, but rather about configuring a system that expands its applicability and potential.
“The novelty is the creation of a compact system, not dependent on masonry superstructures, that is easy to install and operate. The technique used is simple, but its design is advanced and aligned with sustainability concepts”, says Mareco.
The filtration technique used to decompose organic matter is based on a combination of physical and biological phenomena. The filtration, adsorption and degradation stages are carried out by earthworms added to a biomass of bacteria, constantly fed with the sewage bacteria themselves that are located in the filter. Sewage treatment is completely sustainable, as what is produced after filtration – treated water, humus and earthworms – can be reused and the difference is the non-production of by-products such as sludge. For the inventors, reused water can be applied to gardens, for example, and humus can be used as fertilizer.
Read article in full published on the Unicamp Innovation Agency website.
