MEMBRANE BASED INTEGRATED ANAEROBIC-AEROBIC PROCESS FOR THE TREATMENT OF TEXTILE WASTEWATER

Abstract

We are surrounded by rich diversity colour in our daily life, we all like wearing colourful clothes, who can imagine among us our world in black and white? Clothes, flowers, rainbow, foods, animals, all remain in black and white; what kind of life would it be? Hence colours are very important in our life. This described beauty can hide harmful impacts in the background, where these colours are produced, if these issues wouldn’t be immediately solved, this can lead definitively to a disaster and transform the world not only to black and white but to a polluted world where future generations would suffer from damages caused unintentionally with the pretext of replying to the high demand, which requires high production. In other words and as Saint Exupery said: “we do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we merely borrow it from our children”. It is a responsibility before being an issue to resolve, as explained above, colours are important in our life , but their production needs not only a huge amount of water , but produces at the same time incredibly a high level of pollution, it is a matter of water pollution or more specifically, the sector meant here is textile wastewater production. The main concern of this thesis is to deal with a Model Textile Dye Wastewater (MTDW) in a combined process anaerobic-aerobic treatment to membrane filtration technology (MBR) by testing and comparing the performance of commercial available membranes (nanofiltration NF and ultrafiltration UF) to the novel antifouling membranes prepared in the frame of BioNexGen EU Project ( www.bionexgen.eu). The choice of this subject is based on several reasons, one of the most important is that Algeria is long regarded among MENA countries, as a land suffering from water scarcity, at the same time having great and active textile industry sectors that consume water and hamper the environment. On the other hand biological process proving being not only efficient but also economically cheap, but alone is not enough since this step is regarded as the first treatment stage, where COD and BOD levels are reduced, therefore the combination with the membrane filtration technology in order to discard the rest of the pollutant compounds.