Due to the rapid growth of electrical vehicle and portable electronics markets, huge amount of the rare earth elements (REEs) and lithium have been required for the manufacturers globally. Moreover, after life time of the battery pass, the waste batteries containing valuable metal resources should be recycled due to competitions between the countries who manufacturing the batteries. Therefore, the REEs and lithium recoveries from the e-waste and wastewaters become issue recently. However, the commercialized technology for the valuable metal recovery is limited. In this study, the uses of the REEs and other valuable metal resources such as lithium, uranium, and gold and there recoverying methods according to the different water conditions were investigated and summarized. Moreover, the possible expectations and suggestions for the future application of the valuable resource recovery were conducted as a review.

Due to the global climate change, Korean peninsula is has been experiencing flooding and drought severely. It is hard difficult to manage water resources sustainably, because due to intensive precipitation in short periods and severe drought has increased in Korea. Reused water from the wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) could be a sustainable and an alternative water source near the urban areas. In order to understand the patterns of water reuse in Korea, annual water reuses data according to the times and regional governments were investigated from 2008 to 2019. The reused water from WWTP in Korea has been mainly used for river maintenance flow and industrial use, while agricultural use of water reuse has decreased with time. Metropolitan cities in Korea such as Seoul, Busan, Daegu, Ulsan, and Incheon have been mainly used reused reusing water for river maintenance flow. Industrial water reuse has been limitedly applied recently for the planned industrial districts in Pohang, Gumi, Paju, and Asan. By using the collected annual water reuse data from the domestic sewerage statistics of sewerage, the optimistic and pessimistic future estimations of for future annual water reuse were suggested from 2020 to 2040 on a five year interval for every five years.

The global water shortage is getting more attention by global climate change. And water demand rapidly increases due to industrialization and population growth. Desalination technology is being expected as an alternative water supply method. Desalination technology requires low energy or maintenance costs, making it a competible next generation technology, with examples such as forward osmosis (FO), membrane distillation (MD), capacitive deionization (CDI), and electrodialysis (ED) to compete with reverse osmosis (RO). In order to identify recent research trends in desalination technologies (FO, MD, RO, CDI, and ED) between 2000-2020, a bibliometric analysis was conducted in the current study. The number of published papers in desalination technology have increased in Desalination and Journal of Membrane Science mainly. Moreover, it was found that FO, MD, RO, CDI, and ED technologies have been applied in various research areas including electrochemical, food processing and carbon-based material synthesis. Recent research topics according to the desalination technologies were also identified.

Due to global climate change, Korea is experiencing flooding and drought severely. It is hard to manage water resources because intensive precipitation during short periods and drought are commonly occurred in Korea, recently. Severe drought occurred in 2015 and 2017 in the islands, and coastal and inland areas in Korea, and the citizens experienced decreased water supply and emergency water service by using bottled water. Therefore, the Korean government provided additional governmental funds such as the grant of drought disaster. In this study, we tried to calculate the cost of water for drought response based on the cost of tap water for the regional local governments in Korea and the grant of drought disaster by the Ministry of the Interior and Safety in Korea, etc. The estimated costs of water for drought responses in coastal and inland areas which have a chance to apply alternative water sources such as brackish or seawater desalination and water reuse in Korea were higher than in other areas in Korea. Additionally, as the novel approach of drought response, the 300 m3/day-scale desalination vessel was suggested to provide desalinated water for the islands in Korea. The estimated expenses of water supply for the target island areas (Sinan-gun and Jindo-gun) by the desalination vessel was lower than those by emergency water service by using bottled water.

Membrane distillation (MD) is a thermally driven desalination process with a hydrophobic membrane. MD process has been known to have a lower fouling potential compared to other pressure-based membrane desalination process (NF, RO). However, membrane fouling also occurs in MD process. In this study, the membrane fouling was observed in MD process according to the pre-treatment processes. The filtration and precipitation processes were applied as the pre-treatment to prevent the membrane fouling. The pore sizes of roughing filters were 0.4, 5, 10, 30, and 60 ㎛. The concentration of the coagulant was 1.2 mg/L as FeCl3. The membrane fouling on MD membrane was successfully removed with both pre-treatment processes.

Membrane distillation (MD) is a hydrid membrane process using the temperature difference as a driving force. In order to enhance the performance (flux) of the MD process, various membrane structures (asymmetric or bi-composite) and materials (PP, PVDF or PTFE) have been suggested. In this study, the support layer of the commercial PTFE/PP bi-composite membrane is modifed by forming the macro punctures in it. The size and location of macro punctures were varied according to the designed support layer porosities (50, 60, 70 and 80 %). The modified membrane test was conducted by using the DCMD configuration. The flux of a modified membranewas enhanced up to 27 % compared with that of pristine membrane when the size of the macro puncture and overall porosity of the support layer were larger than 20 mm2 and 60 %, respectively.

Membrane distillation (MD) is the thermally driven water separation process based on the vapor pressure difference across the membrane. In order to increase the water recovery of the conventional RO process, the additional MD-PRO pocess was suggested. In this study, the syntheric RO brine was used as a feed solution of the MD process. Due to the high salinity of the RO brine, the MD membrane could be fouled by the scalants. In order to mitigate the scaling on the MD membrane surface, the pre-treatment process using the column filled by natural zeolite was applied. The roughing filter was installed between the pre-treatment process and MD system in order to prevent possible particulate fouling by the debries of the natural zeolite. Moreover, in order to enhance the CEC of the natural zeolite, the NaCl soaking was conducted. The flux and electronic conductivity were monitored under given experimental conditions. And the membrane morphology and the chemical compositions were analyzed by using the SEM-EDX.