RO brine treatment and disposal methods

More than 50 percent of countries in the world will likely face water stress or water shortages by 2025, and by 2050, as much as 75 percent of the world's population could face water scarcity. Desalination technologies, particularly the reverse osmosis (RO) process, have increasingly been adopted to produce freshwater from alternative sources such as seawater and brackish water due to water scarcity. However, desalination applications have always been limited by the disposal costs of RO brine and the adverse impact of brine on the receiving environment. The scope of this paper is to identify technically and commercially RO brine disposal and treatment methods such as deep well injection, discharge into the sea, sanitary sewers, evaporation ponds, forward osmosis (FO), vacuum membrane distillation (VMD), vacuum-enhanced direct contact membrane distillation (VEDCMD), RO NF Integrated system, bipolar membrane electrodialysis (BMED), electrodialysis (ED), Electrodialysis reversal (EDR), vibratory shear enhanced processing (VSEP), capacitive deionisation (CDT) and so on. In this paper, as a part of our desalination research package, to achieve profitable and environmental solutions, we assess advantages and disadvantages of mentioned methods through a comprehensive review of worldwide laboratory, pilot and industrial scale experiments.