Partners - PURATREAT
New Energy Efficient Approach to the Operation of Membrane Bioreactors for Decentralised Wastewater Treatment

L `Office National de l `Assainissement was created according to the law no 37/74 of 03 august 1974, it belongs to the "Ministère de l`Agriculture de l`Environnement et des Ressources Hydrauliques". Their principal task is to manage the wastewater treatment sector in Tunisia. ONAS was conceived to act as the principal operator regarding water protection in Tunisia. ONAS is an industrial and commercial public organism with an autonomous finance.

The mission of ONAS comprises the following aspects:
- To combat all the forms of water pollution in Tunisia
- To manage, exploit and take care of all the treatment equipments
- Promoting and reuse the by-products of wastewater treatment plans
- Planning and executing the integrated projects.
ONAS has a very important role in the Puratreat project since it has put the WWTP of the city of Sfax at the disposal of the consortium to carry out the tests with real wastewater collected after the primary treatment. The plant also has laboratories where some of the analyses needed to characterise the wastewater can be performed. ONAS has a strong interest in the realisation of this research due to the high impact that low-cost MBR technologies may have in the area. Apart form the connection of the system to its treatment plant, ONAS intends to estimate the running costs of a potential full-scale system integrating the best technology at the optimum operating procedure to be proposed in the evaluation of the project results.