The deficiency of guidelines and certain criteria that govern the artificial recharge of groundwater with recycling the municipal wastewater is presently affecting adversely or hampering the implementation of large-scale groundwater recharge operations.
Thus, some kind of guidance and policies are needed for planning and implementing new groundwater recharge projects. This will serve as the basis of designing and evaluating of the future and current groundwater projects. The following question arises:
- ~ What treatment processes are used for producing water that is suitable for groundwater recharge? How does the quality of water change in infiltration–percolation and in the groundwater zone? What is the contribution of infiltration–percolation and groundwater passage as per performance and reliability to the overall treatment system? What are the important health issues that are to be figured out? What benefits and losses have been experienced in practice?
- ~ Depending upon the purpose of groundwater recharge, sources of recycled wastewater, the location and methods of recharge, the pretreatment requirements for groundwater recharge vary enormously. One of the effective methods of wastewater treatment is surface spreading method of groundwater recharge. Before using a municipal wastewater as a groundwater recharge a certain degree of pretreatment must be done.
- ~ In terms of Health and regulatory aspects of groundwater recharge with recycled wastewater, Groundwater recharge with reclaimed water plus direct potable water reuse share many of the public health concerns encountered in drinking-water withdrawn from polluted rivers and reservoirs. The issue that has been arisen with respect to groundwater recharge relates to the “SINGLE STANDARD” has been taken as an argument by Ongreth. The single standard means the set of standards should be same for all domestic water sources be it natural or recycled water.
- ~ It’s clear that whatever the source of a given set of chemical contaminants, the same health effects will take place and has equal health consequences if the exposure is the same but there is, however, a huge difference in the circumstances.
- ~ Contrary to this, careful case by case study of proposals that are to be developed as optional projects for potable reuse of wastewater that may deliberately introduce residues of uncharacterized substances into community water supplies to make sure that benefits are much greater than the risks that are evaluated.
The present or the current guidelines and drinking-water standards were not designed to deal with the contaminants that may be unique to wastewater sources, so they alone cannot be used to completely evaluate the acceptability of a recycled water for potable reuse. It is within our capability to give appropriate standards that may have limits on individual substances as well as aggregates, on treatment and source management specifications. Tapping of polluted sources has potential effects that go beyond the increased cost of additional treatment. The health concerns associated with drinkingwater drawing upon polluted sources apply even more forcefully to treated wastewater reuse for portable purposes.