Impacts of different media on constructed wetlands for rural household sewage treatment

Abstract

Constructed wetland systems have been used for treating a variety of household and industrial wastewater; they are a wastewater treatment technology that has high economic efficiency and environmental effectiveness, especially for sewage treatment in rural areas. Medium filler plays an important role in wetland sewage treatment processes. By carrying out a problem analysis of the ineffective operation and treatment of traditional wetlands, this paper designs different constructed wetland fillers to treat rural household sewage. Using the same plants, this paper chooses four different fillers, namely maifanite, steel slag, bamboo charcoal and limestone as substrates to build constructed wetland systems, and studies rural household sewage treatment in order to examine their effects on the degradation of pollutants. The results show the removal efficiencies obtain good effect. The theoretical maximum adsorption capacities of all these media are ordered as: maifanite > steel slag > bamboo charcoal > limestone. The effluent water quality meets the first class A standard of the “Discharge standard of pollutants for municipal wastewater treatment plant” (GB18918-2002). The selection of medium has an important significance for the operating results of constructed wetland sewage treatment systems.