ABSTRACT
Water covers nearly 70% of the earth’s surface, and water is one of the major ingredients in the food and beverages industry. In Canada, the food and beverages industry is the fourth largest user of water, which uses around 400 million cubic meters of water per year (total manufacturing industrial use is around 4000 million cubic meters/year) (StatCanada 2011). More than 85% of the water is discharged as a wastewater after industrial use (3226.8 million cubic meters/year in Canada); 76.6% of this wastewater is discharged directly to surface freshwater, and 13% is discharged to tidewater bodies (StatCanada 2011). Based on a survey by Statistics Canada, nearly 34% of this wastewater is discharged into water bodies without any treatment, and most of the wastewater is treated only by primary and secondary treatments, which remove only part of pollutants in the wastewater. Only 12% of the industrial wastewater is treated by advanced wastewater treatments, which removes almost all the pollutants from the wastewater before releasing into water bodies. In the food and beverages industry, almost 50% (209.6 million cubic meters/year) of the wastewater is not treated before being released into water bodies or on land; approximately 98, 23.6, and 15.2 million cubic meters of wastewater is treated using primary (or mechanical), secondary (or biological), and advanced wastewater treatment processes before release into the environment (StatCanada 2011). The situation is similar in other parts of the world, and in developing countries, the condition is far worse than this. The release of industrial wastewater without proper treatment is causing water, land, and air pollution, which might cause health hazards to humans as well as to the environment. It is estimated that around 90% of the health diseases are linked to the polluted water in the developing countries, and most of the pollutants (toxic 246chemicals and pathogenic microbial cultures) found in the drinking water have a link to the untreated wastewater from municipal, agricultural, and manufacturing operations (Bora and Dutta 2014). Thus, proper treatment of manufacturing industrial wastewater is one of the key elements to ensure safe drinking water supplies to the world.
