The use of water in North Africa increased during the last years extremely due to the rising population and industrial activities. This caused a strong decrease of the natural water resources and an increasing salination and pollution of the tap water.

The textile industry is very typical for the North African region and, therefore, the water consumption and the environmental pollution caused by this industry is quite large. Most of these factories have or will have a pretreatment plant. However, the water quality of the effluents is not sufficient for recycling and the effluents contain recalcitrant compounds.

The solar catalytic wastewater treatment is a process which uses sun light for the oxidation of pollutants. Posttreatment by the solar-catalytic process in sun-rich countries is an economically feasible possibility to reduce wastewater compounds like it has been shown in a recent EC Avicenne project. Pretreatment plants of two factories in Algeria and Tunisia are optimized and part of the effluents as well as process streams in the factories will be treated by photocatalysis in pilot plants with a maximum flow rate of 1 m³/h. The influence of the type of process stream and pretreatment on the photocatalytic process will be investigated.

The Flow Film Reactor (FFR) is used in the pilot plants because the design is simple and the performance is high as demonstrated in a previous Avicenne project with similar wastewater. Comparison of modified catalysts with synthetic and textile wastewater and tests with different support materials will be carried out with the goal to reduce the necessary surface area and to minimize the investment costs.