Sustainable wastewater management in an Egyptian industrial city

Purpose - The main purpose of this study is to provide technical support for industrial firms in a new Egyptian industrial city in order to comply with the National Regulatory Standards for wastewater discharge into the public sewerage network.Design methodology approach - An execution plan has been prepared to identify the existing environmental status of all the enterprises in the city. To accomplish the planned activities, relevant information was collected from the available records in the city. A unified questionnaire format has been designed for all enterprises including all activities and information required for this study. Accordingly, industries were classified according to their activities and sizes. The information was fed to the computer using a database to control data entry, analysis, and retrieval. Also, the work plan included industrial auditing, wastewater characterization, and application of pollution prevention measures and treatment of end-of-pipe.Findings - Statistical analysis of the collected data showed that 119 enterprises were distributed among different industrial sectors. The size of factories according to number of employees is categorized as micro, small and medium. Characterization of industrial wastewater produced from 37 plants indicated that 50 percent thereof do not comply with the Egyptian environmental laws, for industrial wastewater discharge into the public sewage network. In this study, three factories were selected to solve their environmental problems. Treatability studies and or pollution prevention approaches for the selected factories were carried out and the recommended solutions were implemented and proved to be cost-effective.Originality value - This paper provides the guidelines for other factories in this Egyptian industrial city to be environmentally friendly via compliance with the local regulatory standards. Dissemination of the achieved results can be applied by other industrial cities in Egypt.