RMIT, an Australia-India collaboration that address water scarcity and identifies ways to reduce the impact by implementing sustainable integrated water management practices. While Australia and India possess different industrial, economic, geographic and cultural characteristics, they do share similar environmental problems such as water scarcity.
Professor Jega Jegatheesan from the School of Engineering is collaborating with researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT M), Mahatma Gandhi University, India, and industry partner Tamilnadu Water Investment Company (TWIC) on a project funded by the Australia-India Council. Jegatheesan said that the project focused on the management and technology of Zero Liquid Discharge (ZLD) which involves a range of advanced wastewater treatment technologies to recycle, recover and re-use the treated wastewater, thereby ensuring there is no discharge of wastewater to the environment.
“The textile industry was selected as the model industry as it is one of the major water consumers and subsequently one of the biggest polluters of water bodies that receive effluent from textile mills,” he said.
The research team is currently investigating the applications of membrane in bioreactor to treat the waste water to produce high quality effluent for downstream processes. Introduction of nanofiltration, membrane distillation and crystallisation will provide further improvement on energy savings.