Industrial Symbiosis: A Suggested Example for Wastewater Reuse

Climate change is leading to water scarcity in many regions of the world and poor communities are the most affected by this problem. Several distances have to be covered especially by women and children in search for water. Meanwhile, agricultural activities are consuming majority of this limited resource and producing large volumes of wastewater through agro-processing activities. This chapter presents a discussion on how to establish an industrial symbiosis between wastewater treatment plants, aquacultural and agricultural activities, and power plants. To effectively do this, literature was sought from the Scopus database and Google Scholar using defined search terms including wastewater treatment, wastewater for aquaculture, wastewater for agriculture, industrial symbiosis, and microbial desalination cells. Several articles were found but only accessible ones were downloaded for this study. Also, Ghana was used as a study example because WHO has over a decade supported the country to undertake studies on wastewater reuse. The available literature shows that treated, partly treated, and untreated wastewater are reused for agricultural and aquacultural activities. Also, the microbial desalination cell can be used to treat wastewater and produce electricity. Having established that wastewater can be reused for the above stated purposes, a future scenario of an industrial symbiosis between wastewater treatment plants, aquacultural and agricultural farms, and power generation plants is presented.