According to the available data, nowhere in Slovenia is agricultural land irrigated with treated wastewater. The purpose of this diploma thesis is to discover whether the farmers in the Vipava Valley are willing to irrigate the land with purified wastewater from communal wastewater treatment plants and, if not, to research under which conditions they would be willing to accept this irrigation method. The working hypothesis was that the water from wastewater treatment plants could be used for irrigation. At the same time, we wanted to present to the farmers the reuse of purified -wastewater as a means of conserving other water sources. For this diploma thesis, we reviewed the available Slovene and international technical literature and also took into account the results obtained from the surveys carried out among 40 farmers in the Vipava Valley. We discovered that the use of purified wastewater is feasible due to the numerous positive responses of the interviewees. A large majority would be willing to accept the method of irrigating land with the aforementioned water source provided the data of analyses conducted regarding the impact this water source has on the environment would be readily available to the public. Despite the farmers' relatively positive attitude towards the use of purified wastewater for irrigation, we are of the opinion that much is to be done before the idea could be put into practice.
|