Air, Soil and Water Research

The middle and southern parts of Iraq are exposed to a series of serious drought-related problems. This is mainly linked to the absence of applied international law for water distribution in the Euphrates and Tigris rivers between Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, in addition to climate change and unawareness of the water resource problems for more than three decades. The Inter-Agency Information and Analysis Unit of the United Nations reported that water in the Tigris and Euphrates will decrease by up to 80% and 50%, respectively, by 2025. Therefore, water recycling would be an essential and inevitable sustainable approach under these circumstances. The biological treatment of sewage, industrial waste water, scientific laboratories effluent, and irrigation waters using compact units is described here to be involved in solving the water shortage in Iraq. The main indicators used to assess the efficiency of these units are chemical oxygen demand (COD), biological oxygen demand (BOD), total solved salts (TSS), and total fecal coliforms (TFC). These units have been approved to treat contaminated waters with 10-fold pollutants in a fifth of the time required as compared to other classical procedures. In conclusion, using these treatment units will be useful in tackling the problem of water shortage in Iraq and could potentially be the best control method to stop the spread of infectious diseases obtained from contaminated waters.