Industrial water pollution — Characterization, classification, measurement

The history of industrial development has been built in partnership with water. For a variety of reasons, factories have always been built on the water's edge (river, canal or sea):

• transport facilities for raw materials and finished products;

• the ability to use water for a wide variety of industrial tasks: the entire history of industrial techniques is linked to the use of water;

• disposal facilities for by-products or waste generated during manufacturing operations.

Water combines an exceptional set of physical and chemical properties; it can become a solvent, a thermal fluid or simply an easy-to-handle liquid. These properties explain why water is involved in all major industrial activities; factories use water repeatedly in successive stages of the manufacturing chain.

In most manufacturing techniques and operations, water comes into contact with mineral or organic raw materials. It partially or totally dissolves them, or draws them into colloidal suspensions.

To use water is practically to agree to pollute it... Indeed, all industrial activity generates pollutant discharges that contain all the by-products and losses of raw materials that could not be recovered or recycled.

In this file, we will proceed to :

• characterization of industrial waste pollution and study of its harmfulness and effects on the natural environment;

• summary inventory of industrial pollution with classification tests;

• quantitative assessment of pollution from industrial discharges, as industrial pollution control requires, as a first step, better knowledge of polluting production through measurement and control.

Readers are also referred to the article Industrial water pollution. Strategy and methodology.