Depending on the fact that water resources in the Middle East in general and in Palestine in particular are very limited due to ecological, climatic and political reasons, and taking in consideration the high production of wastewater and its hazard effects on both human and environment. Wastewater treatment as a strategic approach that will lead to protect our aquatic environment, human health and providing an alternative water resource could compensates the extreme shortage in water. But due to the low effectiveness of conventional wastewater treatment plants (WWPTs) towards removal of some persistent organic pollutants including pharmaceuticals, personal care products, coloring matters, surfactants and some organic matter that are hard to be removed through conventional biological processes; it became necessary to find an efficient alternative or complementary method that can achieve this purpose. To this end, an advanced treatment system consisting of adsorption filtration columns coupled with a solar photo-catalytic reactor will be employed (i) to remove some model micropollutants which are recalcitrant to the conventional treatment technologies from a testing aqueous mixture, (ii) to improve reclaimed water quality in terms of the conventional parameters such as COD, NOX, TOC, Nitrogen compounds, heavy metals, microbial parameters. Furthermore, treatment costs may be reduced by using the sun for solar photocatalytic oxidation processes.

The expected results from this proposed combined system are (i) to remove completely all tested compounds (set of pharmaceutical compounds), (ii) increased reclaimed water quality by developing a successful approach for removing remaining COD, NOX, TOC, nitrogen compounds, heavy metals, microbial parameters and others (ii) optimized advanced treatment system by upscaling the lab-scale results to the pilot-scale for gathering better information for large scale applications in water and wastewater treatment field, (iv) the cost analysis and evaluation report of the environmental impact of the system by using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach.