Agro-industry is growing significantly worldwide in parallel to population growth.

Processing and manufacturing of agricultural products and crops lead to increasingly large quantities of wastewater with a high organic load. While agro-industrial wastewater creates a serious environmental problem, it is also a potential source of biogas and biofertilizers, since its high organic content can be converted by anaerobic treatment to methane.

Presently biological (mainly anaerobic) and physico-chemical treatment systems are used for treatment of agro-industrial wastewater. The process is very slow and unstable, and it allows for low loading rates, which result in a high cost of treatment. For some effluents (e.g. olive mill wastewater) satisfactory treatment methods have not yet been developed.

Methods are needed that significantly improve overall operational performance of treatment of agro-industrial wastewater with high organic load at lower capital and operational costs than state-of-the-art methods.