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Wastewater treatment hasn’t changed much in the past 50 years. For biological based treatment, there are variants, but they are all based on aerobic and anaerobic processes. 

Aerobic Processes

Biologically treating wastewater requires oxygen to fuel decomposition. The bigger your facility and the more wastewater streams you create, the more oxygen the on-site treatment facility will need; otherwise, treatment will either slow down or require an increase of power and overall time to process said waste. Both of these result in the overall system decreasing its efficiency, thereby increasing costs. 

Anaerobic Digestion Systems

Anaerobic digestion uses microbial communities to remove organic matter without oxygen. Fun fact: while there have been many advances since then, the first anaerobic digester was actually installed in India in 1859 in a leper colony.

Many modern wastewater treatment facilities use anaerobic digestion in some form. A low-cost form of anaerobic digestion is the use of anaerobic ponds in which wastewater is dumped into a hole as it would be in a landfill and left fully to biological processes to solve. However, agricultural industries and large industrial plants have more commonly incorporated anaerobic digestion because of the significant side-benefit of generating a type of methane known as biogas which can be captured during the treatment process and used as an energy process. 

Because the system itself creates and captures energy, anaerobic digestion systems offer sustainability benefits to companies, as the biogas can offset power demand for the facility and help meet greenhouse gas commitments.