ABSTRACT
Access to clean water and proper sanitation is considered a basic human right, as addressed in the United Nations (UN) resolution 64/292. There are a number of ways to fulfill this goal, but the focus here will be the implementation of green technology for the treatment of wastewater prior to its re-use or release into the natural ecosystem or municipal distribution network. In contrast, reliable green technologies could include: wastewater ponds; slow sand filters; treatment or constructed wetlands (CW). All the green technologies are biological treatment systems because they rely primarily on rhizospheric processes and microbial activity for cleaning wastewater. Designing active experiments around the components of interest, with the aim of developing a deeper process understanding, would be really valuable to investigate the ability of CWs to handle the increasingly diverse wastewaters. Several design criteria are derived from a statistical analysis of existing CW performance data combined with model experiments.
