Use of municipal and industrial wastewater in and around nangal for construction purposes

Abstract

Water is one of the vital needs of all living beings for daily activities like drinking, washing, bathing etc. It is the most important factor in shaping the land and regulating the climate. The quality of water for drinking and other activities if does not satisfy the standard conditions of physical, chemical and biological characteristics as prescribed it then becomes ineffective. The quality of water is usually described according to its. Hence it becomes necessary to find the suitability of water for various purposes like drinking, irrigation and Industrial purposes. Rapid industrialization and use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides in agricultural lands, discharge of voluminous municipal and industrial waste waters are causing deterioration of water quality vis-à-vis depleting of aquatic biota. This ultimately causes massive pollution not only to the rivers, ponds and wells but also drastically degrade the quality of groundwater. Research have been undertaken to use such type of waste water in different construction purposes. It is absolutely true that demand of fresh water by the construction sector is expected to increase due to high increase in the growth of construction activities in India (Dhanraj, 2017). Highly polluted Sutlej river in Punjab has been a constant encouragement to the environmentalists about reusing the contaminated water of the river. A total of 14 water samples from different point sources of pollution were collected and tested for physico-chemical parameters (pH, temperature, DO, BOD, COD, TSS, TDS), metals (As, Cd, Co, Cr, Cu, Fe, Mn, Ni, Pb and Zn) and microbiological parameter using World Health Organization (WHO) and the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) standards to justify how the strength of concrete goes on varying with respect to using the river water directly. An attempt was made to justify the use of wastewater directly in preparing concrete for construction purposes by testing concrete cubes prepared by the untreated water and comparing them with the strength of standard cubes.