Characteristics of Traditional and Emerging Water Treatment Technologies and Their Comparison

With the growth of urbanization and industrialization in the world, excessive water pollution has led to water scarcity as one of the most important problems today. Therefore, how to purify water resources has become the main way to solve the freshwater problem, and the water treatment process is the main way to purify water resources. This article investigates the traditional technologies represented by biofilm and activated carbon technologies, and the emerging technologies represented by ozone oxidation, photocatalytic oxidation and membrane separation technologies, comparing and summarizing their principles, advantages and disadvantages, and application scope. The study finds that traditional technologies like activated carbon technology have the advantage of being inexpensive, low cost and technologically mature. However, they often produce secondary pollution and cannot be reused, leading to the fact that traditional technologies alone are not suitable for water treatment in today's society. As for emerging technologies such as photocatalytic oxidation, although they have solved the problems of secondary pollution and high efficiency of traditional technologies, they are also due to the high infrastructure cost to limit the pace of their promotion in water treatment plants. Therefore, by comparing and contrasting the advantages and disadvantages of these technologies and their scope of application, this article hopes that the technologies can be combined to realize the purpose of promoting them in water treatment plants, thus purifying water resources and alleviating the problem of water scarcity in today's world.