Wastewater Reclamation and Re-useTakashi Asano (ed)Technomic Publishing Inc., 19981528 pp, $149.95ISBN 1 56676 620 9

Reviewed by George Solt (Olney, UK).

This tome of 1528 pages weighs 1.9 kg, costs $150, andcredits 73 contributors. It’s No. 10 of the publisher’s 11-volume ‘Water Quality Management Library’, and that inturn must be a massive undertaking —too massive, perhaps.

The book is loaded with good stuff, and will very likelybecome the standard reference book on the subject. Havingsaid that, I have some adverse criticisms.

It is much easier to accumulate verbiage than to reduceit. Not surprisingly, seeing that most of the contributorsare American, the writing is not exactly terse. Any facts youmight be looking for are well buried in a mass of paperand the index, though extensive, doesn’t necessarily help� rst time. The editor presumably just used his authors’contributions as they were received. Taking the blue pencilto them would have been a formidable task, but muchslimming could have been achieved without losing anythingof value.

The book also contains standard material which is beststudied in the text books to which it properly belongs. Forexample, a discussion of � nancial calculations (amortiza-tion, Present Value, etc.) duplicates the excellent booksavailable on those subjects. The same goes for conventiona lpuri� cation processes such as coagulation and � occulation,� ltration and UV. (Quite likely these are also dealt with inthe other 10 volumes of this series. One wonders how manytimes the series duplicates itself in this way.)

Some sections have little obvious value, such as a ratherjokey 13-page account of a publicity battle against a parti-cular groundwater re-charge scheme which was waged(for political reasons) in the local Californian media. Oddlyenough, there is no discussion of groundwater re-charge assuch, nor other important topics such as domestic GreyWater treatment.

In England, industry accounts for about half the totalconsumption of public water supply, and other industrial-ized nations’ usage is probably similar. Industrial watereconomy is therefore an important subject, but internalwater recycling in industry is not discussed (except a briefmention in a recital of South African legislation), andthe only mention of the use of low-grade water for industrialuse comes in a case example on power station cooling water.

I picked the subject of micro-� ltration at random:it gets very short shrift, and will be found in two quiteunconnected sections. There is a page and a half tuckedinto the RO chapter, and another page and a half reportingUS pilot trials with a Memtec unit—but no mention of thebig Memtec plant which treats Sydney’s wastewater.

These criticisms would be unfair if they applied to a lessmassive tome, or a book which merely sets out to reviewthe existing literature. But this apparently sets out to bea standard text, in a standard reference library. While itcertainly contains lots of useful information, better organi-zation would have been helpful.

The inclusion of many case examples—they take upalmost half the book —is a great plus point. Most of these

are from the USA, but there is a worthy effort to make thebook international, with examples from Israel, Portugal,Tunisia, South Africa and France, and sections on EU andWHO legislation and standards.

This leaves the basic (i.e., the 150-dollar) question: whois going to � nd this book useful? Teaching institutions,certainly. Each chapter is followed by a long list ofreferences guaranteed to get students off to a good startin their researches. It contains extensive chapters on themedical, legal, regulatory and � nancial framework whichgoverns wastewater and its treatment and re-use. There isalso good advice on the political problems involved, thoughthis won’t help much outside of the USA.

In effect the book is useful to anyone involved in awastewater reclamation scheme, including non-specialistsin this � eld, and possibly even non-technologists. I wouldn’tbuy it myself, but I would make quite sure I knew fromwhere I could borrow it.

Handbook of Chlorination and AlternativeDisinfectants, 4th editionG. C. WhiteJohn Wiley & Sons Ltd, 1999156 pp, £132.00ISBN 0 471 29207 9

Reviewed by Simon Judd (School of Water Sciences,Cran� eld University, UK).

This is a mighty tome of over 1500 pages. The book iswritten for the US market in US imperial units, ostensiblywith users rather than researchers in mind. It is, perhaps notunnaturally, defensive about the use of chlorine, and isgreatly embellished with anecdotes. The presentation is alittle jumbled with inevitable repetition and, as there is nodetailed contents page, the reader will often � nd it nece-ssary to thumb through chapters page by page to retrievethe information needed. The book, which is the fourthedition, is also somewhat dated in its information sources.This becomes all too evident when the author focuses hisattention on things European (for example, ozonationpractice, 1223–1226). On the other hand, it could beargued that chlorination is a very much mature technology.

The book opens with the manufacture (50 pages) andphysicochemical properties (7 pages with another 8 pagesof appended � gures) of gaseous and liquid chlorine. Thefollowing 38 pages are dedicated to hazards imposed bychlorine and chlorine leaks, the latter based largely on casestudies. The � nal 4 pages are dedicated to chlorine use inindustry. Both this chapter and the following ones onhypochlorina tion (Chapter 2) and OSEC (Chapter 3) aresomewhat prescriptive and heuristic in approach, which onewould imagine plant designers and operators would favour.The OSEC chapter, for example, is composed, in the main,of an extensive and detailed design and product guide.

All the fundamental information on hydrolysis equilib-rium thermodynamics and stoichiometry is placed in thefollowing chapter on chlorine chemistry. Once again,the information tends to be anecdotal, and the chemicalmechanistic information regarding the chloramine reac-tions is somewhat elderly: no papers more recent than 1990have been cited, and this includes Jafvert and Valentine’sbenchmark 1992 mechanistic study of this subject. The

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organic chloramines section is somewhat confused, and alsolacks more recent information on the subject.

The following chapter on chlorine assay borrows butgreatly expands upon the blue book standard methods. Thefollowing three chapters, totalling 446 pages, deal speci� -cally with the practices of potable and wastewaterchlorination and disinfection. If one is prepared to takewith a pinch of salt what is referred to as modern practicein some sections within these chapters, then they provide auseful and detailed guide to principles, treatment strate-gies and experience in these key applications. One couldquestion the pertinence of the 150-odd pages devoted towastewater disinfection by chlorination, but a lot of theinformation is generic. For example, 20 of these pages dealwith contactors—hardly application speci� c.

The Chlorine Facilities Design chapter which followsis almost 300 pages long, and Chapter 11 on Operationand Maintenance � lls another 150 pages. This furtherdemonstrates that the author appears to be more at homewith the practicalities of the system than the governingchemistry.

In essence, though, to criticize this textbook on the basisof its incomplete coverage of chlorination would be harshindeed. The pronounced bias of the book is perhaps mosttellingly revealed in the coverage of ‘alternative disin-fectants’—a shade over 300 pages compared with thepreceding 1150 pages devoted to chlorination. It goeswithout saying, then, that coverage of ozonation and UV,

key water and wastewater treatment processes today, issomewhat less comprehensive than that of chlorination.The key issue of the formation of bromate is dismissed ina couple of sentences on page 1235. There are noticablyfewer plant schematics and plates of gleaming proprietaryequipment than for the chlorination chapters, and the keygoverning subject of gas transfer is dealt with somewhatrudimentarily on pages 1303 –1304. Only 6 pages are givenover to UV AOPs (advanced oxidation processes), andinformation on operational experience of municipal waste-water disinfection by UV irradiation is severely lacking.

The book functions extremely well as a chlorinationhandbook and, perhaps, rather more poorly as a scienti� ctextbook. It appears to be comprehensive in its coverageof most practical engineering aspects of disinfectiontechnologies, and this is especially so for the practice ofchlorination. Elucidation of the fundamental chemistryof disinfection processes is somewhat limited, and recentdevelopments included appear to be limited to disinfec-tion by-product health effects and US legislation. Hence,for comprehensive information on more recent advancedoxidation and disinfection technologies, especially outsidethe US, the reader might do better to look elsewhere. Onthe other hand, the book is very readable, packed withinteresting snippets of information and must constituteessential reading for anyone working in disinfection plantdesign, operation and maintenance whenever referenceto the benchmark chlorination process is needed.

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