AGRONOMIC QUALITY OF EFFLUENTS FROM WATER RECLAMATION PLANTS

Abstract

In San Luis Potosí City, México, there are in operation six water reclamation plants, the effluents are used in the agriculture irrigation, this is convenient considering the arid climate of this city. For the best use of this resource, we have done the present study evaluating the agronomic quality of effluents through twelve indicators that are not in the official Mexican norm NOM-003-ECOL-1997, which details the acceptable characteristics of this resource for public reuse. The results showed that the effluents have acceptable quality on SAR (< 10 me L-1) and pH (6.5-8.4). The rest of the indicators were: electrical conductivity, effective salinity, potential salinity, residual sodium carbonate, adjusted SAR, infiltration reduction, chlorine, boron and sodium, all of them resulted conditionated in general form. The improvement of this indicators, and therefore of this resource, is possible using several technological options exposed here and available to the producers. One of the relevant measures is the adaptation of juridical instruments linked to the residual water for agriculture reuse, on this sense, more evidence must be created on the national level that reinforce this proposal.