Microsieving-based advanced primary treatment (APT) has attracted increasing attention as an approach for restructuring carbon and energy flows within wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). Unlike previous work that has often addressed individual microsieving technologies or specific recovery routes separately, this review provides a unified framework for comparing drum screens (DSs)/drum filters (DFs), cloth disc filters (CDFs), and rotating belt filters (RBFs) with conventional primary sedimentation (PST) in terms of separation mechanisms and pollutant capture. On this basis, it further discusses recent progress in energy and resource recovery from primary screenings, together with their relevance to energy demand reduction and carbon redistribution in WWTPs. Current limitations arise at two levels. Microsieving technologies remain constrained by mesh fouling and limited control over selective pollutant capture, while plant-wide evidence remains insufficient, particularly regarding techno-economic assessment of recovered products and life cycle assessment of full plant performance after replacing primary sedimentation. Future work should therefore focus on targeted process optimization and plant-wide evaluation of economic and environmental feasibility.
Zhang et al. (Tue,) studied this question.