Research Article Open Access

Studies on Treatment of Wastewater from TannerIES

Abstract

Due to the high conductivity of the global wastewaters from a tannery industries, wastewater reuse is only possible if reverse osmosis process is implemented in the wastewater treatment. The supernatant of a physical-chemical treatment is still very polluted, containing high COD values between 3000 mg/L to 4000 mg/L and conductivities of nearly 20 mS/cm. In this work, a combination of filtration, ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis is evaluated as treatment for the physical-chemically treated wastewater. Conventional treatment methods such as neutralization, clari-flocculation and biological processes are followed to clean the effluents before feeding to RO membrane modules. The characteristics of untreated composite effluents such as pH, COD, TSS, TDS and total chromium were in the range of 4.00-4.60, 680-3600 mg/L, 1698-7546 mg/L, 980-1480 mg/L, 4200-14500 mg/L, and 26.4-190 mg/L, respectively. Inorganic ions like Ca2+, Na+, Cl– and SO4 -2 were found more in the wastewaters. Conventional treatments significantly removed the organic pollutants but failed to remove dissolved inorganic salts. Membrane technology removed the salts as well as remaining organic pollutants and the product water is reused in the process. The studied tanneries (5 numbers) have achieved 93-98%, 92-99% and 91-96% removal of TDS, sodium and chloride, respectively. Seventy to eighty five percentage of wastewater was recovered and recycled in the industrial processes.

Gopal k. Sharma and Anjani K. Dwivedi

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