With water scarcity a common plight of both the rich and the poor in urban and rural areas, water management has become a buzzword. There is increasing awareness that, apart from rainwater harvesting, wastewater recycling could solve the scarcity problem to a great extent. In this context, effluent treatment plants will become the order of the day in industrial complexes and multi-storey buildings. 
Setting up a wastewater treatment unit requires space and capital costs, including recurring 'operation and maintenance' costs involving energy and manual labour, hence it becomes a costly affair. There is need to optimise these costs for sustainability. To address such problems, Carewell Technologies and Products, Bangalore, has come out with 'Vertical Hybrid Biotech Reactor.' It is a vertical effluent treatment 
plant ideal for residential and commercial complexes, and 
for food processing industries and hotels. 
The reactor is based on a combination of anaerobic technology and biotechnology, and aerobic technology. It requires minimum space and the cost of the plant is also less than the conventional processe plant.
The cost of the unit depends on the capacity. For instance, a unit that treats 50,000 litres of waste water per day will cost up to Rs 10 lakh. The reactor requires only two pumps for 'operation and maintenance.' 
The treatment reactors are vertical in nature, requiring less space. Biotech products are seeded with anaerobic system and aerobic system to enhance efficiency of the treatment. The use of anaerobic technology results in biogas production, which can be also used for domestic purposes. UASB (Up-flow anaerobic sludge blanket reactor) reactor with little modification and blended with a biotech product is considered in the first stage of the treatment. 
The modification in UASB does address many problems of the conventional reactor. The second stage includes the tower trickling filter blended with a biotech product. The design guidelines are from CPHEO (Central Public Health Engineering Organisation, the Government of India) manual and other international standards, except the patented biotech products. The units can be prefabricated and dismantled, and can be shifted from one place to another with some civil works.
The system does not have any moving parts with the 'physical and biological' forces of nature being 'accelerated and engineered' to get optimum parameters, and the treated effluent meet the discharge limits 
prescribed by the Pollution 
Control Board. As there are no moving parts in the system, the operation and maintenance cost is less. 
The power is required to only pump the wastewater to the treatment unit which is odourless since the gas is used or flared. The general plan 
area requirement is 50 per cent of the conventional treatment plants. The unit is on pilot scale in Bangalore.