ABSTRACT
Environmental technology has been used for more than 100 years to solve pollution problems. Biological treatment of wastewater has been applied although in modest scale in Europe even before the start of the twentieth century. Before Rachel Carson’s book The Silent Spring, it was the only tool available for the solution of pollution and environmental problems in general. Environmental technology refers to treatment of wastewater, smoke, and solid waste through the use of technological methods. Environmental technology is best fitted to solve pollution problems from point sources because it makes possible the use of the technological method directly on the point source, which implies that the amount of wastewater, smoke or solid waste is limited and rather concentrated. It is therefore possible to develop, in most cases, a technological method that is able to reduce the concentration of pollutants with a high efficiency. Environmental technology requires in many cases a relatively high investment, and the operational costs are sometimes high, too, although there are also many examples of relatively low operational costs. After the development of the other tools to solve pollution problems (presented in Chapters 12 and 13 and environmental legislation, see Section 13.7 and Jørgensen et al., 2015), it is clear that environmental technology often has to be beneficially combined with the other tools to find the most effective and moderate-cost solution, although there are also several cases where environmental technology is the only obvious method to apply. This is particularly the case for industrial pollution problems, in which environmental technology may even offer possibilities to recover or recycle raw material and simultaneously to remove toxic substances.
