| Summary: | Nowadays, water scarcity is becoming more severe due to increasing water demand. It has been widely accepted that NEWater production from wastewater is a promising alternative to alleviate the water shortage. However, the current NEWater production process adopts the conventional biological process as its core process which has been widely critiqued due to its intensive energy consumption, large footprint, excess sludge production, and complex configuration. Therefore, an integrated moving bed ceramic membrane bioreactor (MBCMBR) and reverse osmosis (RO) process was developed in this study. It was demonstrated that 99.9% of COD and 97.2% of TN were removed in the MBCMBR-RO system, resulting in better product water quality than NEWater. Additionally, the proposed MBCMBR-RO process could achieve 23.7% and 33% of energy savings and footprint reduction respectively. Therefore, the MBCMBR-RO process could offer a new alternative for NEWater production with smaller footprint and lower energy requirements.
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