Internships

Sanita Dhaubanjar ’13

This summer I worked in the Bio-based and Green Energy laboratory at ­Kathmandu ­University researching various topics in energy recovery from wastewater. I reviewed literature on decentralised wastewater treatment systems for developing ­countries and eventually focused more on anaerobic treatment of wastewater. Through this ­internship, I gained a thorough understanding of wastewater systems and ­analysed the ­failures of wastewater treatment systems that have been implemented in ­developing ­countries,with the goal of identifying suitable treatment methods for ­Nepal. Bureaucratic and ­administrative issues are usually responsible for failure of many ­engineering projects in the third world. However, I realized that in the case of wastewater management, ­technical inefficiencies have also made it hard to develop sustainable wastewater ­treatment projects. Appropriate technologies that are simple, efficient, and easily adoptable by the local community are lacking. While I don’t plan to expand on this project yet, I am interested in looking into wastewater management issues.