Water Quality Evaluation of Regional Wastewater Management

Abstract
A water quality evaluation of regional wastewater system centralization was undertaken to test the hypothesis that water quality improvement may result from the spatial and temporal variations in wasteloads attributed to decentralized regional systems. The evaluation employed water quality models developed for both deterministic and stochastic analyses. Each analysis considered a set of experiments which involved a determination of the water quality resulting from alternative degrees of regional wastewater centralization. Water quality was measured in terms of the minimum dissolved oxygen concentrations experienced by alternative systems. It was concluded that decentralized regional wasterwater systems may result in significantly higher stream water qualities than that achieved by highly centralized systems.