INTEWAR

Design and construction of a pilot plant for decentralised wastewater treatment started

© FiW e. V.

As part of the INTEWAR project, the Wastewater Research Unit (WRU) of the University of Yaoundé 1 has started designing and building a pilot plant for decentralised wastewater treatment. The aim of the project is to design a low-cost wastewater treatment plant using locally available materials within the framework of the waste concept, which purifies the sanitary wastewater of a neighbourhood before it is released into the environment. The purification unit of the plant will be a trickling filter filled with a mixture of gravel and lids of collected plastic bottles. Bacterial cultures shall grow on this and take over the purification of the wastewater. The prophylene lids are provided by the Cameroonian recycling company NAMé-Recycling. NAMé-Recycling and the the INTEWAR project has been in contact since the beginning of the project to discuss the problem of widespread plastic waste in Cameroon. This project is now a result of the joint discussions as currently, the lids are a by-product of the recycling process and are used, for example, as an aggregate in road construction.

The construction of the pilot plant and the subsequent series of tests lasting several months will take place on an area of the University of Yaoundé 1 and will be coordinated and managed by the local project partner WRU. The wastewater for the experiments comes from a nearby student dormitory. At the moment, it is still being released untreated into the environment.

The use of low-cost wastewater treatment plants in flood-prone areas can reduce the unhindered release of pathogens on the one hand, while the use of plastic lids in the system motivates the continuous collection of plastic waste on the other.