Avaliação de desempenho para estações de tratamento de efluentes industriais.

Abstract

The industrial production process can generate large amounts of wastewater. These effluents, when untreated, can pollute soil and water, causing great environmental impact. In this sense it is essential that all industries that generate wastewater own a treatment plant. In order to keep the treatment plant permanently functioning according to its purpose, it should be routinely evaluated. Therefore the performance evaluation for Industrial Wastewater Treatment Plants (IWTP) becomes an important tool for maintaining its efficiency, and justifies itself by seeking vulnerable points on the treatment plant and providing subsidies needed to produce diagnosis and projects to adequate the systems, allowing treated effluent to remain in compliance with the requirements established by the environmental legislation. In this work, a methodological proposal was designed, formed by a road map composed of levels of questioning, which assists the evaluator in the performance analysis of IWTP. In complement to this road map some checklists were developed to help guide the evaluator in his analyzes. While preparing these lists, manuals developed in several countries were considered. The checklists include questions to assess the general data of the industry, its Environmental Management Systems (EMS) and some systems and operations of the treatment plant. To illustrate one of the road map questioning levels a case study was included, in which the influent and effluent of a mining industry are evaluated by multivariate statistical technique called Principal Component Analysis (PCA), to demonstrate the performance of the IWTP. The result of the assessment showed a good performance by the IWTP while treating wastewater. It is expected, therefore, that this study is useful for evaluating the performance in plants where industrial effluents are treated.