In municipal waste water treatment plants in Germany, priority pollutants such as heavy metals, pesticides and chlorinated compounds, which are designated in an EU directive, are not yet being completely eliminated from the waste water. Furthermore the water treatment process is not being investigated for these substances in a standardized manner, and there is as yet no unified national approach. Often the available data is not sufficient for reaching a realistic assessment of the pollutant loads dispersed into municipal drainage systems. This is where a new project comes in, developed by the BIOPLAN Landesgesellschaft in cooperation with the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT), which has the following goals:

• Standardization of quantitative sampling, test sample preparation, and analysis of priority substances
• Investigation of these substances’ behavior in municipal water treatment facilities
• Producing nationally and internationally available data sets, in order to derive emissions factors regarding priority substances.

Guidance and Monitoring

The results produced thus far have been used to derive emissions factors of priority substances for the calculation of entries from the drainage of municipal water treatment systems, and to thereby optimize the entry balance. The collected information produced will be compiled in a set of recommendations for the sampling and analysis of priority substances in urban water drainage systems. In addition, it will represent the foundation for an expanded and coordinated monitoring program. A nationally applicable database of pollutant concentrations in the effluent from municipal waste water treatment plants is to be created.

Project operation
BIOPLAN Landeskulturgesellschaft
Pfohlhofstraße 20
74889 Sinsheim
Telefon 0 72 61- 59 95
Fax 0 72 61- 6 14 06
E-Mail bioplan-lambert@t-online.de
Internet www.bioplan.de

Cooperation partner
Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT)

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